


Anastasis

by geometrician



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aftermath of Possession, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, F/M, Gen, Hell Trauma, M/M, Nearly Human Castiel (Supernatural), POV Multiple, Rating May Change, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21614818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geometrician/pseuds/geometrician
Summary: After waking up alone with no memories, a newly-resurrected Adam Milligan hitchhikes his way home to Windom, only to find that the answers he's looking for lie with two brothers and a (supposed) angel in West Virginia. As Adam slowly recovers his past at the Winchester household, all of John's sons begin to come to terms with the consequences of their decisions. There's also a mystery afoot: Who brought Adam back, and why?
Relationships: Adam Milligan & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Adam Milligan & Kevin Tran, Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 31
Kudos: 51





	1. eden

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing this fic on and off since 2014 as a fix-it, since it didn't seem like they were ever going to address the issue of Adam for years. However, a little birdie told me that we're going to get a very special episode soon, and even though this fic won't take that episode into account, I thought I'd post this in gleeful anticipation. Updates will be highly irregular, as I haven't finished writing the whole thing yet; I'm posting the first two chapters together as they're pretty much set in stone, but it might be a few months before you see more. In the meantime, please enjoy this appetizer! I'm excited to share the rest once it's finished.

When he wakes up this time, there is something different about the world. The sky is gray, but so bright that it hurts his eyes; he raises a hand to cover them and is startled to find that his arm is damp, that specks of dirt and splinters of dead grass cling damply to his pale skin.

He sits up. He is in the middle of a vast field, and when he stands the grass brushes at his calves. The hills are a faded yellow, dotted here and there with trees shaking off red and yellow leaves, and in all directions lies the misty suggestion of a forest. A brown creek is marked off with the standing husks of cattails and reeds. And the wind – the wind starts as a whisper, far away, growing louder and louder until it seems to howl straight through him, and he shivers.

Grass stalks and twigs dig into his feet as he walks, and walks, and walks, and eventually he leaves the field behind and the grass gives way to leaves and dirt. The forest is quiet around him but the trees seem to be sighing, settling their roots deep in the ground and preparing for the coming cold. And even these pass, as through the trees he finds a road, a mud-streaked gray ribbon of asphalt twisting into the distance, halved by a dotted yellow line. He follows it at a distance, unwilling to leave the cover of the trees. The occasional car passes below, unsuspecting.

It leads to a covered bridge, where the rush of water from the river below fills the air and rebounds off of the wooden boards – it forces him out of the woods for a brief moment. He sees telephone poles, a pair of ratty shoes tied together at the laces and dangling from the wires. The land slopes beneath his feet, and he goes down, down, down through golden woods and quiet streams, past giant boulders covered in moss and lichens, past abandoned birds’ nests and once or twice a grazing deer. When the road flattens out, his feet ache and the sky blazes orange in the sunset, diffuse light glowing through sheets of frozen cloud. For a moment his breath catches in his chest because it looks like a great fire. It is steady and silent and in some places it looks like the sunlight is catching on veins of gold and making them shine white-hot.

The forest grows thinner and thinner and he can see now that the road runs between the feet of gentle hills. A house stands on the side of the road, two stories, white siding and blue shutters. The lights are on inside, on the second floor, and the curtains are drawn, but faint silhouettes move back and forth behind them. Laundry flutters gently from clotheslines in the yard, linens and shirts, dresses and pants. The sun is low in the west at the end of the valley and is quickly sinking, broken up by the spreading trees standing here and there around the houses. Suddenly he feels exposed – he is naked, after all – and he takes care that no one sees when he slips in between the clotheslines and takes a pair of jeans and an old, worn shirt. The shirt is gray and says _NEWMAN FAMILY REUNION 2019_ on it, with a list of names running down the back. It looks old—the print is flaking off in some places. When he puts it on, the sleeves hang halfway down his hands. The jeans barely fit him. Neither of them do much to keep the cold out.

It’s nearly dark and he stands still for a long while, debating whether to stay or keep walking. He decides to stay – there’s a shed behind the house. It’s sealed with a padlock but the strike plate is rusted through and the wooden frame is partially rotted. He pries the plate off as quietly as he can and opens the door slowly, wary of the creaking hinges, and steps inside, then closes the door behind him. There’s a window inside and it lets in the last light of sunset. The interior is a little dusty, but clean. There’s a lawnmower, rakes, a handsaw, hammers, boxes of nails, a set of power tools, garden shears, coiled extension cords, cans of motor oil and gasoline, a folded tarp. There is a stack of boards in the corner, probably intended to replace the rotting doorframe.

When night descends and brings darkness with it, he curls up with his head on the tarp and sleeps.


	2. the pickup

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael begins his sojourn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll encounter a lot of OCs in this chapter and the next; if that's not your cup of tea, rest assured that we're returning to the main cast shortly. :)

At six in the morning, heading to Adelphi, Roger picks up a kid on the side of the road who doesn’t know his own name. It looks like he’s been sleeping on the ground, what with the grass sticking out of his hair and the dirt stains on his shirt. He’s got a lot of theories: lost hiker, kidnapping victim, escaped from a caretaker, victim of a prank gone wrong. Maybe Roger’s the one being pranked – maybe he’s on candid camera. He doesn’t know how much entertainment an old trucker can give the people nowadays. He’s picked up hitchhikers of every creed and color in his time. Nothing is a surprise anymore.

Well, the kid’s not really a hitchhiker. He was walking barefoot on the asphalt and Roger had to honk to get his attention. It took a lot of convincing to get him into the passenger seat. For his own safety, really. You never know what kind of sickos are out on the road these days. He can’t be older than eighteen or nineteen. About Justin’s age. The thought of his nephew lost and alone on some Ohio backroad makes it easy to ignore the kid’s uncomfortable silence and wide-eyed stare. This is someone’s kid, too, and it’s his job to make sure that someone gets their son back in one piece.

“You know where you’re trying to go?” Roger watches the kid look up, startled.

“I don’t know,” the kid says. Then he looks over at him, cautious. “Where are you going?”

“Adelphi. Shouldn’t be more than half an hour until we get there.” _He got in the car without asking,_ Roger groans internally. He could have been dead in a ditch by now, or worse.

“What’s that?”

“Adelphi?” Roger shrugs. “Little town. Has a diner that we’ll drop by. By the sound of it, you’re hungry.”

The kid’s stomach grumbles again and he winces apologetically. Roger waves it off.

“Look, I was gonna take you to the police or a hospital or something, but you don’t seem hurt, so before I decide where to take you, we’ll get something to eat. Sound good?”

A hesitant nod. In the pale gold half-light, the kid looks almost like one of the stained glass windows from the Episcopal church Roger attended as a kid. The sun, lighting up his yellow hair like gold, making his blue eyes gleam, his gaze piercing like a sword. A man with a face as innocent as a child’s, with all the poise of a soldier. The mural of Saint Michael.

He shakes his head and looks back at the road. What an odd memory. He hasn’t been back to All Saints Episcopal in decades. It frightens him a little, the sudden intensity of the image. It hangs in the back of his mind. Saint Michael, with his long spear pointing toward heaven, multicolored wings folded up behind him, the head of Satan crushed under his foot. The air around him has changed. Roger sits up a little straighter, as if he’s in a pew and the minister’s eyes are on him, and the eyes of a hundred spirits.

Then, in the distance, he sees – and slows down. He stops about thirty feet out from a herd of deer, crossing the two-lane country road, tawny, and striped by the sunlight falling between the bare branches of the trees. Mist pooling around their thin legs, their cautious steps. A buck follows the herd, moss and leaves hanging from his antlers. He stops, turns to look at them, then slowly raises his head and bellows, breath pouring out puffs of white vapor. The sound is like a trumpet, and echoes and echoes off the sides of the mountains. For a moment, everything is still; Roger’s heart skips a beat in awe. In decades of trucking, there’s hardly anything that he hasn’t seen on the road, but this – it seems like the stag is telling them something, acknowledging them like fellow travelers.

“Amazing,” he breathes. “Ain’t Mother Nature wonderful?”

There’s no response. Roger looks at the kid. He has a white-knuckled grasp on the armrest and a thousand-yard stare.

“You all right?”

The kid shakes his head, peels his hand off the rest, and rubs his eyes. “Yeah. I… yeah. It’s nothing.”

He looks back at the road just in time to watch the stag disappear into the trees.

“Okay,” he says, and lifts his foot off of the brake. “We’ll be there soon.”

And they roll on toward Adelphi.

* * *

Valerie Newman watches as a trucker walks into the diner with a young man in tow. The young man is wearing a t-shirt that her daughter designed for their family reunion last year at Hershey Park. The front says _NEWMAN FAMILY REUNION 2019,_ and above the Y in “family” there’s a red stain from when her father-in-law accidentally spilled chili on himself during dinner last week. It looks like Martha couldn’t manage to get it out after all.

The first thing she does is call her in-laws to make sure that they’re not dead and that this boy and this trucker haven’t murdered them and taken their clothing – which is her first conclusion, of course, since she’s always been a worrywart – and gets confirmation that the shirt is, indeed, missing; Martha thought she’d misremembered putting it up on the clothesline. She’s about to be angry when she hangs up the phone, since the boy is clearly a thief, but something about him is… well, disarming. He looks around with wide eyes like he’s never been in a restaurant before, and he’s clearly too small for the clothes he took from her in-laws. He doesn’t have shoes on, either, and she thinks she can see dirt on his face and grass in his hair. Maybe a thief, but maybe for good reason.

“Hey, Susie, can I take that table?” she says quietly, catching the other waitress’s arm. Susie wrinkles her brow questioningly. “I’ll explain later. Just take my next table. It’s important, I promise.”

“All right, honey,” Susie sighs. “But you’d better tell me everything after.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She practically swans over to the trucker’s table, where they’re still perusing the laminated menus Susie set in front of them.

The trucker looks up at her and gives her a polite smile. His hat is on the seat next to him over a copy of the local newspaper, and he’s got a trustworthy vibe. _Serial killers can be very charismatic,_ she reminds herself sternly. Well, that’s what watching reruns of murder investigation shows tells her, at least.

“Good morning,” she says brightly. “I’m Val. Can I start you two off with anything?”

“Just coffee for now, thanks, no cream or sugar,” the trucker says.

They both turn expectantly to the boy, who seems to freeze, panicking as he looks down at the menu.

“You can read, right?” The trucker looks concerned. Valerie purses her lips.

“Yes, sir,” he says, then looks at her. “Um – I’m sorry. Water is fine.”

She nods. “I’ll be right back.” Then she takes a little bit of a closer look. There’s definitely dead grass in his hair, and a smudge of dirt on his chin. “You’ve got a little… something,” she says, gesturing to her chin. “In your hair, too.”

The boy immediately runs his hands through his hair and comes out with a few pieces of dead grass trapped between his fingers.

“Oh,” he says, awkwardly holding the stems in his hands. “I…”

The trucker intervenes smoothly. “Is there a bathroom here, ma’am?”

“Over there, in the back,” she says, pointing at the door with her finger. “There’s a trash can in there, too.”

“Thank you,” he mumbles, getting up from the table. She can see his bare feet, the soles dark with dirt, as he walks across the diner and pushes the door of the bathroom open, disappearing momentarily.

She exchanges looks with the trucker. “Is he – you know – okay?”

“Hitchhiker,” he says, shaking his head. “Apparently he can’t remember anything, not even his own name. I picked him up walking on the road about half an hour out.”

“He’s wearing my father-in-law’s clothing,” she says, lowering her voice. “He probably took them off the clothesline yesterday.”

The trucker shrugs. “To be honest, ma’am, I don’t think he’s dangerous. He seems like he’s been through something awful, to not remember how to order a drink.”

“I’d like to talk to him after you’re finished with your meal, if that’s all right, Mr.—”

“Roger,” he says, holding out a gnarled hand. “Roger Wilkins.”

She shakes it firmly. “Roger. Call me Valerie.”

“Good to meet you, Valerie. I’m on a delivery, so I can’t guarantee that I can keep him here for too long. But you’re welcome to try to get some sense out of him, if you like.”

“I’ll be right back with your coffee,” she says, nodding.

It’s almost seven-thirty, which is when the Sunshine Diner really lives up to its name. The bright yellow walls almost seem to glow as the sun rolls down over the Appalachians. Almost like a postcard, or a memory. She doesn’t get much of a chance to enjoy it, though, because Susie accosts her in the kitchen as she’s filling one of the ceramic mugs at the coffee machine.

“So, what’s the deal?” Susie somehow manages to make her whispers drill right through a person’s ear in search of their brain. “I saw you talking to that trucker, do you know him?”

She puts her hand on her hip and sighs. “That young man sitting with him is a hitchhiker who stole some of David’s clothes to wear.”

“Oh, my _word,”_ Susie says, patting her hands over her graying hair as if she’d been blasted by a sudden wind. “Is he all right?”

“They’re both fine, Susie, but I’m going to have a talk with the boy after they finish eating.” She scoops ice cubes out of one of the freezers and pours them into a glass, then heads to the water dispenser. Susie follows, curiosity insatiable.

“There’s something strange about him,” she says, and Val prepares to retort with some facts. “I don’t know what it is. Not bad, but strange, still. I’ll keep an eye out for you, dear, and don’t worry about the other tables.” And she pats Val on the shoulder and leaves. Her words leave a sense of foreboding at the bottom of her stomach.

Ordering food goes pretty much the same way as ordering drinks did. Roger hems and haws for a moment before getting the breakfast special with eggs over medium, but the boy just doesn’t say anything until they start making specific suggestions. He doesn’t know what he wants. Even this simple menu seems too overwhelming for him. It’s as if he’s coming from a different civilization, like _Gulliver’s Travels_ or something like that. Eventually he settles on blueberry pancakes, and Valerie whisks their menus away after jotting that down on her notepad.

She calls out the orders to the kitchen and goes back to her usual routine of greeting, seating, and serving, always keeping an eye on the booth in the corner where Roger and the boy are sitting. It’s unclear what she actually expects to happen. Maybe their true serial murderer natures will come out and they’ll all end up on an episode of _Crimesolvers._ Maybe it’ll all be a big sitcom misunderstanding. _Or maybe you should stop watching so much Netflix,_ she scolds herself. They’re eating pretty slowly. The boy has his head cradled in one hand, fork in the other; Roger is reading the local newspaper. They almost look like father and son, really – well, adopted, a white kid and his black dad – and no one else except Susie seems to pick up on anything abnormal about the shoeless amnesiac boy. Confirmation bias, maybe. Paranoia, also maybe.

 _NEWMAN FAMILY REUNION 2019,_ the shirt says. She tries her best to put it out of her mind. _You worry too much,_ she can hear Samantha saying in that typical teenager whine. _Relax, Mom, not everything is a disaster just waiting to happen!_

Of course, she’d been referring to her mid-semester C-minus in algebra, but Valerie supposes it applies here, too, and takes a deep breath in the kitchen.

* * *

The kid has about half a pancake left of his short stack when the vague, headache-y discomfort he’s been showing seemingly explodes into a full-fledged migraine. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and groans, propping his elbows up on the table, food completely forgotten.

“Hey, kid, you all right?” Roger asks gently.

There’s no response, but the fingers on his hands curl. Roger can only watch as his arms begin to shake with tension. He can see the kid’s clenched jaw, hear his quiet but erratic breathing – he’s got to be in pain. For a long, horrible moment, he just watches while he grasps for different words. And then it stops, and the kid relaxes a little, runs his still-trembling hands through his hair. He takes a deep breath and looks straight at him with a chillingly clear gaze.

He starts the question again. “Are you—”

“Michael,” the kid interrupts. “My name… is Michael.”

Roger leans forward. “You remembered?”

“I think so.”

“Is there – do you have a last name? We could use that to help you find your way back… wherever you’re supposed to be.”

The kid slumps back in his seat. “No,” he says. “No last name. That’s it.”

“Okay, Michael,” Roger says slowly. “How did you remember?”

“I don’t know.” He sounds tired. “I just got this headache, and then… it just came to me. It was strong, familiar. I don’t know what else it could be… except my name.”

“Any images? Or just an impression?”

There’s a touch of pain in Michael’s expression. “Felt like I was burning up,” he says. “And that it wouldn’t stop, ever. Until it did.”

The waitress chooses that moment to stop by.

“Got a minute? Or is this a bad time?”

“No, no,” Roger says, scooting inwards on the booth seat. “He remembered his name just now.”

She raises her eyebrows. “That’s good.”

“I’m Michael.” They shake hands as she sits down, smoothing her skirt beneath her. He shakes his head. “Look, about the shirt, I’m sorry, I really am…”

“Never you mind about that shirt, Michael,” Valerie says, waving her hand dismissively. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s yours. I just want to hear how you got it.”

Michael folds his hands on his lap, looking like a chastened schoolboy. “I, uh… when I woke up, I didn’t have any clothes. So I walked around and… found some on a clothesline. So I put ‘em on. And then I saw that the shed was open, so I slept in there for the night. Woke up early, and… here I am.” He watches Valerie’s expression. “I really didn’t know, ma’am, I wasn’t in my right mind.”

“That’s for sure,” she sighs, not unsympathetically. “My land. I got quite a scare when you walked in the door, but… you don’t remember anything else, do you?”

He shakes his head wordlessly.

“I could take him on the road through tomorrow morning,” Roger says, “but I have a turnaround, and I think I’d rather take him to the police station. See if they can get some thumbprints or ID, and get him home safe.”

Valerie turns her sharp brown eyes on him. “Where are you headed?”

“I’m going up to Albany. Got a delivery to make. Then I’ll be headed back down to Arkansas straightaway.”

“He can stay with me, then.”

Michael, who had been in the middle of taking a sip of water, almost chokes in surprise.

“I’m not joking.” She tucks a flyaway strand of gray hair firmly behind her ear, resting her arms on the table. “If it was my daughter running around out there naked and alone, I’d hope to God someone would take care of her. And I’d rather not have you dropped off at a truck stop somewhere – or even at the police station. Roger here has done a fine job getting you back to civilization, but I’m under the impression he has a deadline to meet.”

Roger nods uncertainly. “That’s mighty kind of you, Valerie.”

She shakes her head. “It’s the decent thing to do. I can get someone to cover for me.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Michael says softly.

For a moment, she looks sentimental, as if she’s welcoming back her own long-lost child. Then she snaps back into action, asking Roger for a bunch of information that sort of takes him aback. Roger looks at his watch and says he’ll stay another half-hour to get things straightened out; Valerie darts off to get her shift covered. Michael is slumped against the window, looking exhausted.

It occurs to Roger that he’s loath to let the kid go. He’s barely known him for more than three hours, but there’s something in him that wants to see him end up safe at home. The same thing that lights up whenever his sister video-calls him and brings the whole family around to chat for a minute as he’s pumping gas or standing in line for fast food. He barely even knows the kid’s name – Michael might not even be _his_ name, and he doesn’t seem to recall his surname, either. It’s a little like leaving a jigsaw puzzle behind, unfinished.

Valerie asks him for his contact information. He has his cell number and a rarely-checked email account, as well as his supervisor’s number and a family contact. He feels like he’s filing for employment as he writes it down on a notepad in big, jagged letters. Every so often, as he tries to remember numbers and names, he looks up to see that Michael is still leaning against the window, looking at nothing in particular, lost in thought.

He seems like a good kid. Enough that, given everything else wiped from his brain, he’s seemingly hard-wired to _sir_ and _ma’am_ his elders. His table manners are certainly better than Roger’s, at least. Whoever raised him did a fine job. Deserves to get their son back.

“All right,” Roger says, once he finishes writing down everything he can think of. He tosses a few bills down on the check plate along with the note, folded in half. “I hate leaving you like this, but it looks like you’re in good hands.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Michael says, giving him that half-smile again. “You picked me up. Without you, I’d still be walking on that road.”

Roger takes a long, hard look at him, then tears off another sheet from the notepad, writing down his name and number.

“Call me,” he says, handing it to him. “When you get home safe. And I mean _home._ Let me know I did good by you.”

Michael nods, taking the slip of paper in his hand. “Yeah, of course.”

“All right, then.” He waves to Valerie, who comes over and takes the check. “Can you let me know what happens to him? Number’s on the note.”

She nods. “You’re a good man, Roger Wilkins. Drive safe.”

Michael stands up when he stands up, and Roger reaches out to shake his hand.

“Don’t get into trouble, you hear?”

“Thank you,” the kid says sincerely. “You helped me get my name back.”

“You’ll get a lot more back in time,” he replies, attempting to reassure him.

He leaves the diner and takes a deep breath as the doors swing shut behind him. It’s good, fresh mountain air, and the sun is shining bright. He tugs at the bill of his cap to shade his eyes as he walks back over to his truck.

 _Gotta let it go, Wilkins,_ he thinks. _At least for now. Got a job to do._

He remembers the deer, bellowing in the early morning mist, antlers tangled up with rot and loam.

Then he’s back on the road, headed to Maine.

* * *

Valerie, being of relatively sound mind and body, knows there won’t be anyone at home for a while, so she takes Michael back to the scene of the crime: her in-laws’ house, about forty-five minutes out of town. Michael doesn’t say anything, preferring to stare out of the window. That’s fine by her – he’s probably been through some kind of unspeakable _Law-and-Order_ -level trauma, so he’s entitled to some silence in between interrogations. She just turns the radio up and listens to traffic reports and old-time-religion music. It’s one of the only stations that can still get to play when they’re properly in the mountains.

 _Oh, can the circle be unbroken?_ the folk singers ask in staticky voices. _There’s a better home a-waitin’, in the sky, Lord, in the sky…_

They pull up to David and Martha’s house after the trees start breaking into fields. Michael looks uncertain. He definitely recognizes the place, and probably feels strange walking back here wearing stolen clothing. She tries to shoot him a smile for confidence as they climb up the steps to the porch, but he doesn’t quite manage to return it, and she turns back to the door, rapping on it with her knuckles.

They’re elderly, so it takes them a slow, uncomfortable minute to answer the door. Michael glances at her, nervous.

“No reason to be scared, hon,” she reassures him. “David and Martha are good people.”

The door rattles as locks are turned, and then the wrinkled, white-haired, jumper-clad, yet still somehow Amazonian form of Martha Newman fills the doorway.

“Valerie,” she exclaims warmly. “So good to see you!”

“Good to see you too, Martha.” They hug, and then she puts her hand on Michael’s shoulder encouragingly. “This is Michael, the boy who took David’s shirt.”

Michael’s arm shoots out to handshake position immediately. “Sorry, ma’am,” he says.

Martha shakes his hand gently. “No harm, no foul,” she says, almost flippantly. “Come in, both of you. I was just starting lunch.”

The house is quite small, even with two floors and an attic. There are two bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, and a sitting room and a kitchen on the first. One of the bedrooms used to belong to Valerie’s husband, but it’s been taken over by David, who’s started snoring somewhat fierce in his old age. There are photos all over he walls of family and friends, mostly grandchildren – Lucy and Harry could probably take up an entire wall by themselves. The rest is all wooden furniture and doilies and armchairs and beige carpet, college paraphernalia and souvenirs. Paintings, mostly landscapes of rolling hills and rivers.

They move down the creaky little hall next to the staircase to the kitchen, where a small table is set up with three chairs, one of which is already reserved for a tall stack of newspapers and magazines. The kitchen is cluttered, too, with (admittedly clean) kitchenware everywhere, magnets and postcards and newspaper clippings coating the fridge, and plants growing wildly on every sill.

Michael looks tense and nervous, almost frightened. Val is half-scared he’s going to bolt. Seems like none of her reassurances worked. Martha tells them to sit down at the table, and they do. Michael sits with his shoulders squared, back ramrod-straight. She almost wants to tell him to relax, but then Martha starts talking again, and her mother-in-law has a way of commanding a room. Hard not to, when she’s just a smidge under six feet tall.

Martha has a rack of cookies cooling on the stovetop, and she starts scooping them onto a plate.

“I thought you were starting lunch,” Val comments.

“I’m sure Harry would consider this lunch, and he’s in good company,” Martha says primly. “Now, Michael I’ve heard you’re the boy who took my husband’s shirt off the line.” She takes some glasses from a cupboard. “It doesn’t quite fit you, nor do those pants. I think we might have to get you some new ones.”

Val thinks Michael has gone into shock by the time Martha turns around and puts a plate of chocolate chip cookies between them, pouring three glasses of milk.

“I,” he starts, but Martha shushes him.

“It’s clear you’ve come from very unfortunate circumstances, young man, and it’s our duty as the folks around you to offer help, so I don’t want to hear any protesting. Now, give me your name again.” She takes the stack of newspaper off of the third chair and sits down with her glass. Val senses that she won’t be talking for a while, so she bites into a cookie. It’s delectable.

“I’m Michael.”

“You don’t know your full name?”

He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.”

“Where are you from?”

“Not sure, ma’am.”

“Are you in college? OSU, possibly?”

“I don’t think so. At least, not that I can remember.”

Martha takes a long, slow sip of her milk, grabbing a cookie from the plate. “Why did you bring him here instead of taking him to the police, Val?”

Val chokes on her cookie momentarily, and clears the blockage with a swig of milk. “I thought you’d like to see him first.”

“I think there’s a different reason. You haven’t touched the cookies, dear,” she admonishes Michael gently. He scrambles to shove one in his mouth. “My instinct is to let him recover and find his own way home. I wonder why that is.”

Her gaze is so sharp that it could cut. Val has to give credit to Michael for not squirming where she would have.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Just a hunch, I suppose.”

“You’re a very instinctual person, Valerie, and I admire that about you, as it’s something we share,” Martha says. She’s never been one to sugarcoat… well, anything. She turns her hawklike gaze back onto Michael. “My instinct is that Michael is a fine boy who has fallen on some hard circumstances, which might not be alleviated by the poking and prodding of policemen.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Michael says tentatively.

She waves a hand at him dismissively. “Martha, please. I’m not a schoolmarm.”

Val would disagree – Martha is probably the closest she’ll ever get to being related to an old-fashioned _Little-House-on-the-Prairie-_ or _Anne-of-Green-Gables-_ style schoolmistress. But she doesn’t say anything for fear of what Martha would call “impropriety.”

“Thank you, Martha.”

“It’s quite all right. Do you have any objections to staying here at least a night?”

He looks to Val with questioning eyes. She shrugs. He bites his lip for a moment.

“That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid I’d be intruding.”

“I am nearly eighty-five years old and I raised three sons. There are very few novel impositions for you to make on me.”

Michael just nods. Valerie is still trying to piece together “novel impositions” herself.

“It’s settled, then,” Martha declares. “I think I’ve got some of Rodney’s spare clothes in the attic. Those should suit you much more nicely. Don’t you think he’s closer to Rodney’s size?”

“Absolutely.” Val knows for a fact that her husband wasn’t built like this kid, but in relative terms, it’d be a step in the right direction.

They leave the table to go upstairs to Rodney’s old room. All of the decorations have been taken down – his football posters, science fair medals, OSU gear – to complete the conversion into a guest room. His old clothes are in plastic storage containers that Michael fishes out of the closet under Martha’s instruction, and they rummage through them for a bit before laying out a few outfits and putting the rest of the clothes back. Val and Martha go back downstairs to allow Michael some privacy while he changes and washes up.

Martha doesn’t seem in the least bit perturbed by any of this, not even that a strange boy showed up on her doorstep in a stolen outfit with no memory. It’s possibly even the opposite. She is… well, perhaps not _re-_ vitalized, but very… vital. Like she’s received a new burst of energy. Val sips her milk in silence as Martha breaks one of her cookies in half, dipping it into her glass.

Michael’s footsteps precede him. As expected, Rodney’s clothes are about half a size too big on him, but seeing that high school football T-shirt still fills her with nostalgia.

“I haven’t seen that shirt in ages,” she comments.

“Neither have I,” Martha agrees. “I don’t think we’ve opened those boxes in years. Should have carted them off to charity a long time ago, but you’re welcome to keep them, if you like.”

The momentary surprise on his face softens her heart.

Martha watches Valerie drive away to cover the evening shift at the diner. Michael is still standing awkwardly near the door, probably reeling from the sentimentality of her hug. She turns left to open the closet and takes out one of David’s jackets, handing it to him.

“Come along,” she says, walking to the back of the house and opening the door to the patio. The boy follows behind her, slipping his arms through the jacket sleeves, obviously trying to mask his nervousness with a straight face. It’s not working very well.

The crisp fall air warrants a deep breath, both to clear the lungs and simply enjoy. It smells of loam and health.

Michael closes the door behind them. She waits for him to look around and recognize the clotheslines, the laundry fluttering in the slight breeze, the trees he must have crept through.

“I slept in your shed,” he says sheepishly.

“Hmm,” she replies. “Must not have been very comfortable.”

He shakes his head.

“Why don’t you rake some leaves for me, Michael?” She points to the rake leaning against the shed. David should have done it before he left, but there’s no relying on that man’s memory these days. “I’m going to sweep up here.”

There are no sounds for a while except the rasp of the rake across the grass and the swish of her broom against the wooden beams. A few birds flitter in and out of the trees, their inquisitive calls echoing in the sunlit woods. Michael is quite methodical, although his brow is continually furrowed as if trying to recall something important. Bit by bit, the grass reappears and the yard is spotted with piles of yellow leaves. They fill a few garbage bags with the leaves and tie them off, leaving them on the patio for later.

“This feels familiar,” Michael says haltingly as he brushes his hands off on Rodney’s old jeans. “I don’t know why.”

“What’s familiar about it?” Martha folds her arms as he picks up the rake.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Something about the air, I guess.”

“It’s good country air.”

From what little she can tell, Michael is a small-town boy, responsible and neat with manners only good parenting could instill at such an age. He’s quiet, although how much can be attributed to the memory loss versus his natural personality she couldn’t say. And there’s something else. Something strange about him, in the way he holds himself, in the light of his face. And something strange about the way she feels, a compulsion to keep it all a secret, a conviction of sacred purpose.

He turns to her suddenly, face creased with worry. “You’re not going to turn me in to the police?” When she shakes her head, he twists his hands around the handle of the rake. “I mean, I appreciate it, but I guess I don’t understand. I could be a murderer or something.”

“I’ve lived most of my life on trust, and I don’t see why I should stop now,” she says mildly. “Call it a religious feeling. A hunch.”

Reluctantly, he leans the rake against the wall and slips his hands into the pockets of Rodney’s jacket. She can’t quite tell whether he looks guilty or suspicious or simply put-upon.

“Well, um… do you need help with any more yardwork?”

* * *

David comes home that evening to a strange boy in his kitchen pulling a casserole out of the oven while Martha is setting the table. Setting his boots to the side, he ventures down the hall and pokes his head into the room.

“Hello,” he says warily.

The boy flinches and almost drops the casserole, startled, while Martha comes over to kiss him on the cheek.

“David, this is Michael. He stole some of your clothes this morning.”

“Oh.”

Michael quickly sets the casserole on the table and takes off the oven mitts to shake David’s hand. “Really sorry about that, sir.”

“How did you get here, son?”

“Valerie drove him here. Apparently he hitchhiked to Adelphi and she recognized your old shirt on him when he sat down at the diner.”

“I see.” This is a lot. He hangs his jacket on the back of one of the chairs and turns to the sink to wash his hands. “Well, I’m curious as to why you took my clothes.”

“I, um, didn’t have any of my own.”

Martha unties her apron and folds it up, placing it on the counter. “He’s lost almost all of his memory. We haven’t been able to figure out how he ended up here.”

“I see,” David says again. “Well, there’s – no hard feelings. Maybe we can figure some more of this out over dinner.”

They all sit down at the table, and Martha says a quick grace before they start to eat. At first he’s not sure what to ask – he’s never been too good at starting conversation – but Michael seems to grow more and more antsy until he has to let his question out.

“Martha told me you’ve both been living here since 1968,” he says.

“Oh, yes. It’s actually the house of an old family friend who passed it on in his will. Probably built in, ah, 1947, I think. So that would make it about seventy-three years old.”

Michael taps his finger on his fork as he does some mental math. “So this year is… 2020?”

“That it is. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right. I… I don’t think it was even 2010 the last time I looked at a calendar.”

Martha shares a concerned glance with him.

“Well, that’s the last time you remember looking at a calendar, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. It’s just a hunch.” He drags his fork through the remains of the casserole on his plate, deep in thought.

Martha has a lot of those hunches, and she usually turns out to be right, so David simply nods and keeps eating. Martha herself gets up to pour some more water into their glasses.

“What sparked that memory, then?”

Michael shrugs. “I don’t know. Just talking about the time, I guess.”

“Well, maybe we should talk about other things. We could start with family. That’s likely where you’ll get the most help, I think.”

There’s a brief pause, and David digs through his memory to see if he has anything that might help him. He’d spent a few years writing down all of their family history with Rodney’s help, so his recall is fairly good, considering that he’s getting along in years. It doesn’t seem to keep Michael’s interest very well, though. David wraps up the story with his grandmother’s death in Pennsylvania and a few comments on her fine character.

Michael doesn’t respond immediately. He looks to be thinking, as he often has been since David met him.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment. “I think – I have a headache. It’s – sorry.” He rubs his eyes and the bridge of his nose.

Martha sends him upstairs with ibuprofen and a glass of water after they finish putting all of the plates away. The energy Michael had earlier in the evening seems to have dissipated completely, and he just nods when she instructs him to lie down.

After she hears the door close upstairs, she turns to David with pursed lips and a pensive look.

“How long is he going to stay here?”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “All I know is that the police won’t be able to help him. This doesn’t seem like that sort of problem.”

“I won’t mind if he stays, dear, but we can’t just keep him under house arrest until he remembers enough to go home.”

“The problem is that I don’t know if he has a home to go to.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he says honestly. “He’s still young. Are you thinking of keeping him here for long?”

“I suppose we’ll have to wait and see,” she sighs. “I just hate all of this mystery. If he’s a criminal or someone kidnapped him or something – it would be so much easier if we just knew what the problem was.”

“Well, all right.” He puts his arm around her waist. “You have a good heart, Martha. I’m sure it’ll all work out somehow.”

Their questions are answered for them later that night when they’re both woken up by a blood-curdling scream from down the hall. They both leap out of bed as fast as their joints will allow hurry over to Rodney’s room. When they open the door, Michael is sitting up in bed, eyes wide open, clearly just having woken up, but breathing hard as if he’d just run a marathon.

David flips the light switch on. “Michael? Are you all right?”

Michael looks at them for a long moment until it clicks, and then he sighs, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and wiping sweat off of his forehead. “I… I don’t know.”

Martha unlatches the window and lifts the bottom pane up. Cold air floods the room. They sit next to him, Martha on the bed and David on a chair he pulled out from his son’s old desk.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” He shivers, but Martha can’t see any goosebumps on his skin. “A nightmare. I mean, it had to be a nightmare, but it felt real… I’m sorry for waking you up.”

David sidesteps the apology, unease filling his stomach. “What did you dream about, Michael?”

He looks up at David with uncertain eyes. “I just – don’t know how to describe it. Like, it doesn’t make sense. There was a voice, I think, but it wasn’t a person’s voice, and everything was… I felt like someone flipped me inside-out and I was seeing everything through the back of my own head.” His voice cracks, jagged and terrified.

Martha puts a hand on his shoulder. “Even if it’s not real, it sounds like something quite frightening happened to you.”

“Minnesota,” he blurts out.

“What?”

“I have to get to Minnesota. That’s – I think that’s where my family is. I remembered just before I fell asleep.”

The two share a look as Michael stares down at his hands. David scratches his chin. “Do you know what city? What county?”

“No. I just…” He bites his lip. “I just feel it. Like I need to get out on the road and find it.”

“Do you remember anything about Minnesota? The house you lived in?”

He shakes his head. “I have this impression of home when I think about it. That’s all.”

David leans back in his chair. “I think,” he says slowly, “that we should figure this out in the morning.”

“I don’t know if I can go back to sleep.” He looks very, very young for a moment.

“That’s all right. Rodney loved to read, so if you do, too, just help yourself.” He motions to the crate full of worn paperbacks on the desk. Michael nods wordlessly.

Martha is loath to leave him, but they return to their bedroom anyway. She stops in front of her jewelry box, almost glowering down at it with her hands on her hips.

“What’s the trouble?”

“I’m going to give him Grandma Edith’s necklace,” she declares, opening the box.

He lies down on the bed, pulling the comforter back over his stomach. “Weren’t you planning to give that to Sara, when she’s older?”

Martha sighs. “I think it has to leave the family, at least for a while.”

“It’s a nice gesture, I guess.”

“It’s not just a gesture.” She lifts the necklace out of the box. It’s a long, thin loop of black leather knotted through an iron disk about the size of a quarter. Both sides are intricately engraved, although he could never quite make out what it was supposed to depict. “She used to wear it while travelling. Said it discourages evil spirits from following you.”

He raises his eyebrows. “She was _very_ superstitious, if I recall.”

“Yes,” Martha admits. “But she lived to a ripe old age, so I think it couldn’t hurt. Just a little family tradition to help him along.”

She raises the pendant up to the window to look through it. The moon, it seems, fits perfectly within the hole, and for a moment, the engravings catch the light, and glow.

* * *

Martha is an early riser, but Michael has already made his way to the kitchen by the time the sun rises, and it looks like he’s been there for a while. There is a small stack of books next to him, and another that he puts down once he sees her. _The Screwtape Letters._

“Good morning,” he says, stifling a yawn. There are dark bags under his eyes.

“Good morning,” she replies, heading to the counter. “Do you remember if you drink coffee?”

He shrugs, putting the last book on top of his stack. “No, but it couldn’t hurt at this point.”

The coffee machine gurgles to life and begins to cough up black coffee into a glass carafe. David comes downstairs a few minutes later, greeting both of them gruffly and turning the stove on for eggs. She puts a few slices of bread in the toaster and watches Michael yawn for the fifth time. It must have been a terrible dream to give him such determination in staying awake. Light is just beginning to creep through the curtains, now, and he has a very long way to go.

Eggs, toast, coffee, newspaper. David really only reads the finance section, so the rest of the paper is handed over to Michael in hopes that it will jog his memory a bit more. It’s a local paper, so global news isn’t much of a concern, but Martha has half a mind to just set him in front of their television for a few hours. That ought to be enough to bring something up, if she’s getting the correct impression of these younger generations and their screen-watching habits. For now, he seems content to furrow his brow and let his coffee go cold while he looks through the classifieds.

“It’s really 2020,” he says, dumbfounded. That seems to be the most significant detail he’s come across.

“Small towns like these don’t change too much from year to year. Might not show too much.” David turns to her. “Maybe we should get him one of those Columbus papers.”

“I think they stock them at the diner. Oh, land, I should call Valerie today and tell her about all of this.”

Michael is lost in the paper again. “What’s a smart watch?”

It does not get better. Michael wakes them all up with his screaming each of the following four nights. On the sixth day of his residence in the Newman family home, they sit around the breakfast table, all of them clearly exhausted. Michael has deep bags under his eyes and he’s slouching forward over the table. David and Martha find it difficult to move around without various aches and pains flaring up. And no more memories arise.

“I have to go to Minnesota,” Michael says with a depressed finality. “I can’t keep staying here and disturbing you, at least.”

Martha’s own sense of reluctance to let the boy journey out on his own has completely eroded. She just nods, and then tells him to wait while she retrieves the amulet from the drawer in her room.

David says nothing when she reappears downstairs with the disk in hand, but his slumped posture indicates the kind of resignation that is basically approval.

“Come here, Michael.” He does, and she lowers the necklace over his head. “It’s supposed to ward off evil spirits,” she says as he turns the pendant over with his fingers, tracing the engravings. “My great-grandmother wore it when she came over here from Ireland.”

“Thank you.” He sounds so sincere that she feels compelled to embrace him. Rodney was like that, too – genuine, and as well-mannered as she could get him to be.

So, before she can stop herself, she folds her arms and says, “You remind me of my son, you know.”

He looks up at her, pressing his lips together for a moment. “Rodney?”

“He was as good a son as anyone could have asked for. Polite. Gentle. Kind. More decent than I ever thought I could raise a child. Married a woman just as good-hearted.”

“I’m sorry,” Michael says. “I’m sorry I can’t…” He gestures helplessly, hands falling back to his lap.

Martha frowns. “No, don’t be. There’s no replacing him. You are your own person, Michael, and that’s enough. You just happen to be a lot like him, is all.”

“I’ll drive you to the bus depot,” David interjects. “You should pack your things first, though.”

“My things?”

“There’s a duffel bag in Rodney’s closet. I’d show you where it is, but my knees can only take so much of this standing-up business in the morning.”

“Oh.” A bit of wonder lights up his eyes.

Martha wonders for the hundredth time who on earth this boy could be.

The ride to the bus depot is practically silent except for the fuzz on the radio. David’s hands rest on the bottom half of the steering wheel, fingers occasionally tapping on the worn vinyl. Martha’s eyes sweep over the empty road, over the dense forest that surrounds them on all sides, worrying about one thing and then another.

Michael half-sleeps in the back seat, duffel bag by his side. He only wakes up when they hit traffic as they approach a suburb of Columbus and slow down, moving from traffic light to traffic light.

Something is familiar about this. Something about the rumble of the engine, the weight of a bag at his side. Someone else driving. He stares out of the window with half-lidded eyes. People walking by – at the stoplights, at the crosswalks – something… familiar. Old rhythms. David’s fingers tapping on the wheel.

They park in the lot behind the bus depot. Michael shoulders the duffel bag and follows the old couple to one of the ticket kiosks inside the building. It’s dingy and worn inside, seemingly every piece of furniture held together with duct tape. He only partially listens to Martha negotiate tickets for him to – Minneapolis, he hears. But there aren’t direct buses there, he’ll have to transfer…

After what seems like an eternity, David presses two tickets into his hand, along with a wad of twenty-dollar bills and a slip of paper.

“That’s our number,” he says. “Call us when you get wherever you’re going, all right?”

“Yes, sir. I—”

“And the money is to keep you from starving, so I don’t want to hear anything about that.”

He clamps his mouth shut and nods. There’s a lump in his throat.

David’s face is unreadable. He just puts his hand on Michael’s shoulder, and pats it. Martha hands him a plastic grocery bag tied neatly at the top.

“Lunch,” she says. “And dinner.”

“Do you want us to wait with you?”

Half of him wants so badly to say yes, because his bus doesn’t come for another hour or two and they’ve been so kind and warm and he doesn’t quite know what it’s going to be like without them. Cold – he’s been cold. And mindless, just trudging forward. Nowhere to go. No one to go to.

“No, I – I think I’ve asked enough of you,” he says. “Thank you for everything. Really. I hope… I hope I can come back someday. To make it up to you.”

“If you can’t find whatever it is you’re looking for, just call,” Martha says. “You can come by anytime.”

She doesn’t cry. Nobody does. Just two long, tight hugs, and a few more moments of fussing, and then he sits down on a bench to wait, eyes closed so he can’t see them leave. So it’ll be like they never did, until he opens his eyes.

When the bus pulls away from the depot, he finds himself looking back at the ticket office. Not thinking that they’d be there, that he’d have another chance to say goodbye, not exactly. Something tightens in his chest as they pull away, and he curls his hand around the two phone numbers in his pocket.

Nine hours to Chicago. He closes his eyes again, too tired to dream. Martha’s charm lies heavy on his chest beneath his shirt.


	3. the stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A familiar face.

He makes it to the first stop fine, at least according to what he can make out of the city in the dark – mostly street lamps and enormous buildings stretching up into the darkness of night. All he has to do is walk across the bus terminal to the Megabus bay, and he boards without an issue.

The place where the bus parks at the first transfer stop is barely a signpost on the side of an anonymous street, so there’s no brightly-lit terminal bathroom to use. He walks over to a Seven-Eleven some ways down across the street and asks to use theirs. The clerk tells him to buy something, so he grabs a bottle of water and fishes out the wad of cash David gave him, peeling off a ten dollar bill. The clerk makes change, then tosses him the key to the employee facilities and turns away to snap at the bunch of youths hanging out in front of the drinks aisle.

He has his duffel with him and changes quickly after taking a piss. It feels nice, wearing clean clothes. Sliding the keys across the counter to the clerk, he exits the store and pauses for a moment to stretch. The bus doesn’t take off for another fifteen minutes, so he takes a look around. The street is quiet – it’s almost midnight, he thinks – and then it’s not. He realizes that he’s taken a different exit and is standing in an alleyway – and then someone grabs him and drags him behind a dumpster, out of sight of the street. He’s being shoved to the ground, bag ripped from his hands. He scrambles halfway to his knees before someone kicks him in the stomach and he slams back onto the concrete, groaning.

“The cash is in his fucking coat,” someone says. They try to take the coat off of his back, but he lashes out with his leg and catches one of them in the stomach. Finally, he gets a good look at his attackers: two guys in hoodies and sweats, one reaching for his coat again.

He tackles him, desperate. If he loses the bag and the cash, he dies, no two ways about it. The guy stumbles and falls on his ass, but doesn’t lose that much leverage. Before he can get more than one hit in, though, the other one pries him off. He rams his head backward into the second guy’s nose and makes impact with something soft. The guy lets him go with a loud _Fuck!_ and he shakes him off, whirls around, trying to find his bag.

And then there’s a fist in his hair pulling him backwards, keeping him off-balance, and a click. A punch to the gut, to the ribs, no air, but it’s just a punch, he’ll be fine – and then he sees that the other guy is staring at him from what seems like a mile away, face frozen in horror.

And the knife slides out, blood-slick, from between his upper ribs.

“Manny, holy shit.” The sound is muddled. He’s on the ground now. “Fuck. Holy _shit.”_

His vision swims a bit when someone tugs on his jacket.

“A couple hundred. Not too bad.”

“Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

When the roar drains from his ears, he’s alone, bleeding out from two stab wounds, lying facedown behind a dumpster in an anonymous alleyway. It hurts. He can feel the blood draining from his body, and it’s a sickly familiar sensation. The slow drain of warmth from his body, the grit of concrete scraping his skin raw.

The duffel is gone. The money in his coat is gone. He’s still got the two scraps of paper in his pocket, but he can’t get up. Too tired. Pain deep in his muscles. Can’t get up, can’t call. His right lung flutters with each breath, like a wind sock. Almost feels like the knife is still in him, twisting.

No one comes. No one checks the dumpster. No one knows that he’s dying.

A thought occurs to him, sluggish and unwieldy, that even he doesn’t really know who’s dying here. Who he is. Who his parents are. What he did before waking up in this field. Michael. Minnesota. Doesn’t even know his age. His shoe size. His address.

And now he’ll never know.

* * *

Someone

is touching him.

“Hey,” they say, shaking him by the shoulder. “Hey, are you okay?”

Michael cracks one eye open and hears a sigh of relief. He strains to look up. The man is still wearing his Seven-Eleven uniform.

“Fuck, I thought you were dead. Okay. Are you injured? Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”

His limbs are stiff and uncooperative and _cold._ When he moves them, he feels like he’s snapping his bones in half. He groans in pain, and the man makes a nervous sound and helps him sit up against the wall, and very, very slowly, stand.

They go through a door into a warm room. The memories return, foggy and strange.

“My bag?” he ventures as he sits down, lips stiff and uncooperative.

“Brought it in, no worries.”

He’s in the back room of the Seven-Eleven. It’s bright, and his skin feels like it’s being pricked with needles all over. He tries to flex his hands where it hurts the most, but the blood seems set on returning in its own time.

 _Oh. The blood._ He looks down at his shirt. Honestly, it’s not noticeable. He might have started thinking that he dreamed it if there weren’t two holes in the fabric where the knife went in. It occurs to him that he should zip up his jacket to avoid questions. His numbed fingers fumble with the tab.

The man puts a cup down on the table and then sits down in a dinged-up folding chair across from him. He pushes the cup toward Michael, who grasps it and wills the warmth inside to dispel the pinpricks in his skin. It’s coffee. He doesn’t know if he was much of a coffee drinker in the past, but his body doesn’t object to it, so he takes a sip and relishes the feeling of his muscles loosening up.

“So, you get mugged or what?”

He looks up, grimacing. “Guess so.”

“Wanna call the cops?”

It’s a neutral question, but he’s at least got enough brains in him now to know what he’s actually asking.

“I don’t think that would help,” he answers carefully.

“You on the run or something, kid?”

“No. Going home. Or at least, I was.”

He folds his arms and leans back in the folding chair. “What’s your name?”

“Michael.”

“Got a last name?”

He shakes his head. “I… should get going.”

“Hey, hey, no,” the man says, waving his arms frantically as Michael gets halfway out of his seat, muscles stiff and straining. “I’m not trying to get you in trouble or anything, right hand to God. My name’s Scott, okay? Scott Dyer. Just got off my shift and found you lying on the ground. I swear it’s all good. I just wanna talk.”

Scott helps him back into his seat. It’s a little humiliating, no lie, but there’s a little too much going on for him to care overly much about it. The cup of coffee is back in his hand, a little ember of warmth.

He seems concerned. Like, genuinely concerned. He’s sitting there with his brow furrowed, staring intently at him. Michael almost feels a little bad for trying to leave.

“I was on a bus,” he says hesitantly. “To Minnesota. But… I guess it’s gone now.”

“You need to get to Minnesota? Got family there?”

“Uh, yeah.”

He nods affirmingly. “Yeah, me too. My sister lives up in Saint Paul. You know where in Minnesota?”

“I was gonna stop in Saint Paul, actually,” he lies.

Scott grins. “No way? I mean, you got someone to pick you up there?”

Michael curls and uncurls his fingers, more satisfied with their responsiveness now that they’ve warmed up. “Uh, no offense, but…”

Scott puts his hands up. “Sorry. I know I’m snooping. Hey, let me get you something to eat—”

He’s gone before Michael can even protest.

For a few minutes, he’s alone, and he takes the time to force his brain into motion. He assesses his options.

A) Bolt and go somewhere else.

  1. Okay, but where is he going to go?
  2. Also, is he going to hitchhike to Minnesota? He barely knows where Minnesota is. What if he gets stabbed again? The first time wasn’t fun.



B) Stay here and let weird convenience store man (Scott) do whatever it is he does, then leave.

  1. Weird convenience store man might get weirder if he finds out that the kid he took in has nothing to show for being stabbed fatally. Twice.
  2. Jail? Is that a thing that happens to people you find passed out in an alleyway?



C) Ask for money since he doesn’t have any.

  1. Yikes.



None of those seems good. Maybe it’s his brain still defrosting, but it does look like he’s well and truly at the mercy of Scott the Seven-Eleven Clerk.

Speaking of which, Scott steps back into the break room with a Hot Pocket wrapped in a couple of napkins.

“Careful, it’s hot,” he warns, holding it out way in front of him like Michael is a scared animal and he’s trying to coax it out of hiding. Which, if he’s honest, isn’t far from the truth. His brain is completely fried. He gingerly takes the Hot Pocket from Scott’s hand and bites a hole in the corner.

“Thanks,” he says hesitantly. “I, uh – I don’t have any money, sorry.”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about that. Just happy to help out.” Scott shoots him a smile that doesn’t seem all that happy.

The sit in silence for a moment before Michael, fidgeting with the cardboard wrapper of the Hot Pocket, looks up again, unable to come up with an exit strategy. “So… what happens now?”

Scott puts his head in his hand, elbow propped up on the table. “So you need to get to St. Paul. I got some cash, if you need it, and I can drop you off at the transit depot.”

He’s uncomfortable, all of a sudden. Well, more than before. “I was kinda thinking I would hitchhike.”

“That’s dangerous shit, dude,” Scott says, mouth pinching in concern. “Look, I already thought I found your dead body behind the dumpster tonight, okay? And if you won’t let me take you to the cops or a hospital, the least I can do is make sure you don’t die on your way to catching the next bus.”

He might be an amnesiac, but he knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Still, it feels kind of wrong to be doing this, like he’s taking advantage of Scott’s goodwill. But he feels the weight of Martha’s necklace against his breastbone, and realizes that there really is no other option unless he wants to get to St. Paul on foot.

“Why?” he presses anyway. “I mean, you don’t even know me.”

Scott runs a hand through his short, gelled-back hair, and sighs. “It’s just an act of goodwill, dude. What am I supposed to do, send you out into the night?” When Michael just shrugs, he softens a little more. “I had a family member go missing last year. ’Nough said. I don’t like the idea of people just wandering out there, alone. C’mon.”

And that’s how he ends up in the passenger seat of Scott’s car, rolling through the heart of Chicago. It’s barely ten minutes, but they spend a lot of time at the kiosk, finagling a bus ticket out of the dour cashier. Scott ends up spending a not-insignificant amount of money on a ticket to St. Paul, and Michael can only stand there helplessly as he is helped.

The bus takes off in three hours. Scott sits with him in the bus shelter the entire time, nursing a bottle of water from a vending machine. Michael picks through a bag of trail mix.

They don’t talk much about him, since there’s really nothing to say, and he’s kind of wary about giving away his memory problem. Scott seems like the type of guy to worry about that. He lives in an apartment with two roommates; he’s a college dropout; he’s one of the only people who contributes income to his family after his sister ran away from home. He talks about his family a lot. Fourth of July celebrations when he was a kid and they lived in Naperville. Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations. Stories that stir something up in Michael’s memory, like blowing dust off of the cover of an old book.

When the bus pulls in, Scott has been yawning for the past hour. It’s about four in the morning, and the other passengers are queueing up slowly.

“It just sucks that I can’t help more,” he says. “You seem like a good kid, Michael, so take care of yourself.”

They shake hands, and Michael just leaves. It seems wrong, somehow, but he can’t do anything else. So he boards the bus, this time with nothing but his ticket, a bottle of Gatorade, and the clothes on his back.

He can see Scott watching the bus pull out of the station. It’s a lonely feeling, watching him stand there. Like he’s abandoning this guy and his missing sister, just taking his money and leaving.

But as they pass through the endless forests of Wisconsin, nothing but gray sky overhead, Scott’s face becomes indistinct. He digs back further and finds he can’t quite remember what Martha or Roger looked like, either, and falls asleep with his fingers wrapped around her amulet.

* * *

He ends up on the Wisconsin border with ten dollars in cash, which was all Scott could spare. Five of those dollars gets spent on a gas station lunch, and the last five is used to (lamely, he’ll admit) try to bribe a trucker to take him out of the city.

Because, if he’s honest, this place, with skyscrapers and office buildings, feels totally alien. Just like Chicago; just like Adelphi. This isn’t where he belongs, and he has nothing else to do except keep moving.

The owner of the gas station kicks him off the property after a couple of hours, but not without a bottle of water, which he shrugs and counts as part of his string of good luck. So he just starts walking.

He walks a good, long while. It’s sunset by the time he’s firmly in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, the land of tire swings and long footpaths around small lakes. This feels a little more familiar, but he probably doesn’t live here. Wouldn’t it be great if he did, though? If he just peeked through one of the lit-up windows and recognized the people sitting inside?

Secondly, wouldn’t it be great to not be freezing his fingers off? His feet aren’t doing great, either. He has half a mind to go up and knock on a door, any door, and ask to crash on a couch. But he can’t imagine any other outcome than an awkward stand-off at the door. Who’s going to let a random kid into their house at this time of night?

There’s a lake nearby, of course. _The Land of a Thousand Lakes._ He read that in a book, once, although the when and where elude him, as usual. And near the lake, there are benches. He trots down a gentle slope and sits down on one of them, rubbing at his ankles and wrists. Even in the moonlight, he can see his breath puffing out in white clouds. The lake is dark and quiet. No birds swimming at this time of night, and probably not in this season.

It’s the middle of November. Things are only going to get colder from here on out, and he gets the feeling that sleeping in random sheds isn’t always going to turn out so well for him. He needs places to stay at night, which means he needs money.

Or he could just stay on this bench and get hypothermia. The holes in his shirt aren’t helping.

And then the mack daddy of concerning questions. Can he actually die? Did he just dream up getting robbed yesterday, or was it all just a wild hallucination? His duffel might still be on the bus.

But it’s probably not. Something is afoot.

It’s quite possible that, were he to freeze to death tonight, he’d still wake up tomorrow morning. But he doesn’t want to test the powers of – God, the universe, occult magic, or whatever is keeping him alive right now. Maybe he only had the one chance. Maybe someone wants him alive. A chill runs down his back that is completely unrelated to the temperature.

And his stomach growls.

Instead of going up and knocking on doors, he makes his way aimlessly down a couple of streets until he finds a gas station, and next to that, a Burger King.

The lights inside are bright enough to make him squint, and the LCD menu screens – wow, fancy – don’t help. He stands there for a couple of minutes, thumbing through the five bucks and change in his jacket pocket, before ordering a coffee and sitting down in a booth. Not too different from the bench, but it’s warm. He stares down at the white lid, then presses his fingers against his right eye, where a headache is just starting to form.

His coffee is bitter and tastes like burnt rubber. It does warm him up pretty quickly, though. That’s the only upside to sitting in a BK at one in the morning: he has staved off hypothermia for two valiant hours.

He’d start planning something to do tomorrow, like finding a good spot to hitchhike from, but he’s tired and hungry and cold and possibly immortal, and the headache is really going to town on his eyeball. It’s like there’s a leprechaun with a jackhammer nestled in the socket, and boy, is he out for vengeance.

_In the middle of the night, he can hear them talking – his mom and the man who showed up on his doorstep three years ago. His dad. He’s standing right behind the door that he cracked open, trying to be quiet on his way to the bathroom. They’re trying to be quiet, too, but it’s not working. He hasn’t heard his mom lose her temper like this in a long time._

_“I mean, I remembered his birthday, didn’t I?”_

_“We already had plans! When I said it’d be nice for you to spend some more time with him, I didn’t mean you could show up unannounced and – and commandeer him. Did it never occur to you that we don’t have a lot of time together, either? And I can’t just tell him to not go to a baseball game with his dad, or whatever all-American deadbeat shit you’re always trying to pull! My son is not a timeshare!”_

_“Then what am I supposed to do? It’s a miracle I was even in this part of the country in time.” A silent moment. “Come on, Kate, I’m sorry, okay? I just thought it’d be nice if…”_

_She sighs. “Yeah. I know. He had a good time. I just wish we’d planned this better.”_

“Sir? Are you okay?”

He’s ripped out of the memory by the voice of a Burger King employee, one hand on her hip.

“Uh, yeah.” He winces. The headache is fading, but not fast enough. “Sorry, I, uh. I have a headache. But I think it’s getting better?”

The upturn of his tone at the end seems to comfort her. “I’ll get you some water. But if you feel any worse, just come right up to the counter and we’ll get you some help, okay?”

Well, he’s fairly sure he won’t have a stroke, so he just nods and gives her what must be the weakest smile in the history of smiles. She gives him an awkward thumbs-up, and soon there’s a cup of water on the table next to the coffee. He manages to chug it all in one go, with a coffee chaser to counteract the fresh-from-the-dispenser-cold water.

 _Kate._ That name sounds so familiar. Kate’s his mom, he guesses. He wishes he’d been able to see their faces in the memory, but any real part of his past remains frustratingly out of reach. What’s the point of putting up with these headaches and dreams if the memories aren’t going to come pouring back in?

He groans silently into his hands and sits in the Burger King until four in the morning, napping intermittently, before deciding to try his luck at the gas station across the street when a U-Haul rolls in.

The guy driving, some middle-aged dude who looks way too tired to deal with a hitchhiker, is not at all enticed by his offer of two dollars and change; he just shakes his head and jabs his finger toward the passenger seat. At least he doesn’t look like a murderer. Michael shrugs and hops up into the cab, wishing fervently that he didn’t have to depend on the mercy of strangers to get wherever the hell he’s going. He also wishes he knew where the hell he was going. The guy buckles in, puts his coffee in the cup holder, and reaches over to shake his hand for some reason.

“I’m George,” he says.

Michael shakes his hand. “I’m Michael.”

“Hey, we’re George Michael,” the guy says, giving him a thumbs up.

“Okay,” he says, because he doesn’t know who that is, but the guy seems to be expecting a different response, and deflates a little bit.

“Where are you trying to go? Besides west.”

He shrugs again. “Just trying to see how far I can get.”

George sighs and drums his thumbs on the steering wheel before turning the engine on and switching the gear, pulling out of the filling station. “I can drop you off when we get to Alexandria. Probably someone headed out from there.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay.” He turns the radio up until it’s banging around inside Michael’s skull. The lengths a driver will go to stay awake. “We’ll be there in two-ish hours.”

After the initial surge of fear of the unknown, hitchhiking is actually incredibly boring, he finds. And it’s probably not the best idea to fall asleep in a stranger’s car, but what’s he going to do, stab him again? So he takes a two-ish hour nap, regardless of the janky suspension that bangs his head against the window.

Since Alexandria isn’t the goal, he asks George to drop him at the nearest rest stop. George shoots him a weird look, but just makes a face and says okay, and in about two hours he’s off on his own again, watching George’s taillights disappear on the highway.

* * *

It’s kind of a blur from there. The sympathy of the world has run out, maybe. Michael manages to play on the sympathies of truck drivers and passers-by who’ve been down on their luck before. The world shrinks down to gas stations and the roads between them as he coasts on the power of sheer hospitality. It’s probably four or five days napping in fast food chains and in passenger seats, scrounging up change for food, surviving on Dixie cups of water. He’s young, so people have sympathy.

But only so much. A couple of times he gets kicked out of a restaurant or gas station and ends up walking, trying to hitch a ride on the way.

The last time is at night, and the gas station he’s ejected from is remote, to say the least. He doesn’t know where he is, just that he’s probably still somehere in Wisconsin, and the next town over is a couple of miles away. He decides he can probably get there in a night – just follow the road, right? There’s no pedestrian walkway, but the path he chooses doesn’t go along a highway. It’s local-ish. Four lanes and only occasional street lights.

He thinks it’s almost peaceful, walking in the dark, listening to the wind and occasional bird calls. Now that the threat of being kidnapped and murdered has lost its teeth, he can really properly enjoy the world at night. If only he wasn’t so damn cold.

A couple of cars pass by, and he sticks his thumb out as their headlights sweep over him, but to no avail. They don’t seem to notice him.

They don’t seem to notice him so hard that he gets hit by a swerving minivan, even though he can hear the brakes screeching. _WHAM._ He goes up over the hood, slamming his head on something before coming back down onto the road on the other side, and everything goes white.

But only for a brief, sharp moment. By the time the car’s driver reaches him, everything broken has knitted back together. Doesn’t stop his nerves from screeching in alarm.

 _All right, goddamn it, I’m immortal,_ he protests silently as his body slowly starts to realize that he’s not dying. _You didn’t have to hit me with a car to prove it, you son of a bitch._

“Oh my fucking god, Laurie, call an ambulance, wouldja?”

“I’m on the phone _right now,_ Pete. Is he okay?”

“I just ran the guy over! How do you think he’s doing!”

“I’m fine, actually,” Michael wheezes, pushing himself up from the asphalt on his elbows. He really is. Not a skin cell out of place. Well, there are still some scrapes and probably some bruises, but all of the serious stuff has been put neatly back into place. It’s kind of messed up, actually. “I really am. It’s okay.”

“It is extremely not okay, honey,” the wife says, cell phone to her ear. “You could have internal injuries. Just stay still, the doctors will be here soon.”

Crap. Doctors. Ambulances. No bueno. His gut instinct is screaming at him to jet, _now._ “No, that’s okay. I’m totally fine.” He kind of does feel like he got hit by a car, but it’s not physically apparent. At least, not that he can tell.

“Forgive us for not just takin’ the word of a guy who rolled off my windshield just now. What the hell were you doing out here, anyway? It’s dangerous. You don’t have any hi-vis on.”

“I’m hitchhiking,” he says honestly, and tries to get up again, only to for Pete to literally grab him. Damn, this guy really has him zoned. “Look, I’m sorry, but you should really focus on cancelling the ambulance. I’m fine, I gotta get going—”

Pete grabs his other shoulder, too, keeping him firmly on the ground. “You’re not going anywhere until we’re one hundred percent sure you’re okay, kiddo, and that’s that. Internal injuries are no joke.”

Well, this blows.

Internal injuries might not be a joke to Mr. Asshole Driver or the EMTs, but anything that comes out of Michael’s mouth seems to be. He has a sulk of moderate length and intensity in a shock blanket while the ambulance takes him to the nearest hospital and a confused technician checks him over again for broken bones and signs of internal bleeding. Under the lights of the ambulance, he sure _looks_ like he’s been through hell and back. He has dirt and black residue from the asphalt smeared everywhere, some light bruising along the side where he got the love tap, and hey, there’s even some blood still on his shirt from the stabbing.

Luckily enough, they just sit him down in a waiting room because he hasn’t sustained any injuries that could be detected in the ambulance, and he’s not goddamn dead, so all he does is sit there with one or two other people and wonder if he could just leave without them noticing. The lady at the counter is always in and out for some reason.

His eyes flick over to the two guys across from him. One of them is ancient, the quintessential white Midwestern pop-pop in an old windbreaker and a trucker hat, and the other is an Asian dude in a ratty OSU hoodie and jeans who looks like death warmed over.

 _What are you in for_ seems kind of inappropriate for an icebreaker, but it only takes a moment of eye contact before the younger guy rubs his eyes, gives you a once-over, and asks you a question.

“What happened to _you?”_

“Uh,” he says, because rude, even though he literally looks like he got run over sans tire marks, and also because he gets the feeling this guy’s not even talking about that. “What d’you mean?”

He just keeps staring for a moment. “Like, you don’t have to stay in the ER. You know that, right? It counts as false imprisonment or some shit if they try to keep you against your will.”

“I did get hit by a car, dude.” He can’t believe this complete stranger is putting him in a position to defend the dickhead who forced him to come here in the first place. He may have had his tapes wiped, but he's pretty sure fellow patients or whatever don’t usually interrogate each other while waiting for intensive care to call them in.

The guy shrugs. “Yeah, but you’re not hurt, so. You could just go.”

The Midwestern trucker looks at him in consternation, but this seems par for the course or something, because Michael receives no help at all.

“What’s your deal, dude? Is this your schtick, going around to waiting rooms so you can hand out advice nobody asked for?”

Oh, _now_ gramps wants to get a word in. The younger guy cuts him off, though. “Not now, Barry.” And then he circles back. “I’m not in the mood for a visitation right now. And if you’re just going to sit there and play dumb until I say the magic words, well, you’re in the right place to do some waiting.”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” Where’s the receptionist? She should be getting an earful right about now.

“You know, just a word to the wise, prophet to – apostle, or whatever you’re calling yourselves these days – I’m retired. Even if I _was_ interested in the harebrained angelic scheme du jour, I can’t help you.”

Michael turns to the old man in hopes that someone will interpret this babble for him. “Is he okay? Do you know if they’re gonna take him soon?”

“We’re waiting for my daughter to get out of surgery,” he says stiffly, which means Michael gets to cram his foot down his mouth while crabwalking wildly backward.

“I… I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, I bet you are,” the other guy mutters. “Now scram.”

All right then. “I don’t know what your problem is, dude. Is it so hard to believe that a guy gets taken to the ER after getting hit by a minivan?”

“Sure.” He rubs his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “It’s a little harder to believe that a guy who got hit by a minivan sustained no significant injury and is still sitting in the ER for no apparent reason except to be a nuisance. Don’t you have someplace else to be? Some more messages to deliver?”

“Yeah, I have somewhere to be,” he snaps. “And I was on my way there before I got interrupted by a soccer mom’s front bumper. So unless one of you gives me a lift or a map, I guess I’m just going to sit here and _bother you.”_

That makes him blink. “Huh,” he says, squinting at Michael. Then he and the trucker grandpa have a heated discussion composed entirely of tense whispers, and he stands up. “Let’s take this outside.”

“What?”

“Outside,” he repeats. “Just for a minute. What? You have, like, half a foot on me. I’d be an idiot to pick a fight with you.”

The receptionist still isn’t back at her desk. Michael follows the guy out through the double glass doors and into the chilly air of the hospital parking lot. When he turns, it’s to offer his hand.

“I’m Kevin,” he says, as he shakes Michael’s hand. “Sorry for getting on your case in there. I was just… it’s been a long couple of nights.”

“I’m Michael. I’d say it’s fine, but I kinda just want to know what the hell you meant by all that.”

Kevin stares at him, eyebags somehow more pronounced in the half-light coming through the doors. “I mean, you know you’re not just an average human being, right? I don’t have to explain that to you.”

“I—” Well, what’s the use of keeping the cards hidden? What does he have to lose? “Yeah. I know.”

“I have a sense for that kind of thing. Someone like you is usually linked to a higher power with a god complex who thinks I’m still in the business.”

Again with the cryptic bull. “What business?”

“Destiny, prophecy, fate. That whole genre.” He shrugs. “What’s your deal?”

“No idea, dude. Woke up on the side of the road, can’t remember anything, been hitchhiking up north based on a hunch. And I guess I can’t die.” He gives Kevin what has to be a supremely strained smile. “Only tested it twice so far, though. I probably need a third data point to make sure.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna say no to that.” Kevin pulls a face. “I’m headed out after this. You could come with, if you want.”

“Okay, now hold on a minute. You were just laying into me two minutes ago about how I was bothering you, telling me to scram, and now I’m invited on your next road trip? How do I know you’re not going to just up and murder me and chuck my body in a ditch, huh?” Which is a logical concern. He knows he’s just being kind of petty, though, because the alarms that have been going off in his head about the cops and hospitals are for some reason silent around this complete stranger who just snapped at him to leave a hospital after he got hit by a car.

Kevin shrugs again. “Sounds like you’re out of options, dude. It’s my way or the highway. Like, literally.” Then he shakes his head and rubs his eyes again, groaning. “Look, I’m sorry if I’m being, like, a complete dick right now, but I’m running on two hours of sleep and three Five-Hour Energies, and Jenny’s supposed to be out of surgery soon. I can explain stuff later. Like, when I’m coherent. Are you in or out on the hitching-a-ride thing?”

Well, since there’s no other apparent choice, he has to go with the road trip option, and just pray that the guy isn’t about to go postal on him. Not that it would matter, apparently, but his previous two brushes with death weren’t pleasant, so. He takes a deep breath.

“In, I guess.”

“Cool.” Kevin coughs awkwardly. “Shouldn’t be more than an hour before she’s done.”

The both of them head back inside, and, true to his word, the victim(?) is out of the operation room in forty-three minutes (he’s been staring at the clock on the waiting room wall, bored out of his skull). Soon after that, Barry and Kevin get to visit the patient, and only Kevin returns while Barry elects to stay with his anesthetized daughter for the night. They say some quiet goodbyes before Kevin collects Michael with a quick nod, and then they’re pulling into the hotel parking lot and heading up to his second-floor room.

“Pretty sure there’s a pullout,” Kevin says, and chucks a pillow and a blanket from the closet at the tiny couch. Michael is about a hundred percent sure he’s not going to fit on that thing. “Feel free to use the shower or whatever.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah. Not sure any of my clothes are gonna fit you, but, uh. You can maybe try the sweatshirt.”

“I’m fine, really. I—”

“No offense, dude, but you reek,” Kevin yawns from the bed, where he has already burrowed beneath the covers. “How long were you on the road before you got hit?”

“Couple days,” Michael answers, then winces. Yeah, not good. “I’ll take a look.”

There’s a grunt from the lump on the bed, and then snoring after a few minutes, which means Michael is free to do as he pleases.

Fortunately for Kevin, what he pleases to do is take a hot shower and get some clothes on. Clothes he hasn’t been murdered in. The hotel shampoo makes his hair squeak under his fingers, but he doesn’t care. Oh, man, the hot water feels good. He’s sure that lathering, rinsing, and repeating has never brought anyone this much joy.

He roots through the duffel bag to the sound of Kevin’s snoring. Apart from an absurdly big can of Morton’s and a weird number of water bottles, he can’t find any potential tools that a serial killer could use, so he figures he’s actually safe. All the shirts are definitely too small, but there is, in fact, an Illinois University sweatshirt that is kind of loose on him. He doesn’t even try the pants. The jeans will just have to stay on for an additional night.

Despite how small and cramped the pullout is, and despite Kevin’s droning snore, once his head hits the spare pillow, Michael is blessedly out like a light.

* * *

He wakes up to the door opening, and the smell of breakfast.

“Eggs,” his new benefactor announces. “Bacon. Banana. Got you some toast. OJ. Sorry if you’re a vegan, I just grabbed a bunch of stuff.” The plate lands on the desk next to the pull-out sofa.

“Gee, thanks, mister,” he croaks, sitting up and wiping the sleep off of his face. “I don’t think I’m a vegan.”

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Kevin drops his duffel bag down on the bed and starts packing. Michael gets another look at the enormous Morton’s. Nope, not a hallucination. “What _are_ you?”

“Let a guy wake up before dropping the existential crap, man.” He kicks off the blanket and cracks what feels like every vertebra in his spinal column, then tosses the pillow back on the bed and folds the pullout back in. You’d think sleeping in a bed for the first time in a couple of days would actually be good for his back, but apparently every cramp and bump in the road just exorcized itself out through his spine.

He takes a look through the hotel window. Looks like they’re in a small town or suburb. Across from the hotel parking lot is a general store and a couple of restaurants. Chipotle, McD’s, Wendy’s, a T.G.I. Friday’s. Office fronts. Another parking garage.

Breakfast is bland by anyone’s standards, but goddamn, after a couple of days of near-death experiences and half-powderized granola bars, anything remotely warm is a godsend. He inhales it, downs the cup of acidic orange juice in one go, and sits back, contented. Then he sees that Kevin’s done packing and is just looking at him in amusement.

“I was hungry, dude,” he says defensively, but Kevin just shakes his head.

“Nah, man, you’re good. It’s just…” He shrugs and shoulders the duffel. “Let’s talk about it in the car, okay? I gotta check out.”

“Wait. Where are you going? I mean, it’s nice of you to offer, but I was trying to get further up into Minnesota, so…”

He tilts his head. “We can head up north. I don’t have any other jobs scheduled right now.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Do you know exactly where in Minnesota you need to get to?”

“Not really, no,” he admits. “You can drop me off in St. Paul or something, doesn’t matter. Somehow I just know that’s where I need to be.”

Kevin gives him a long look, and then a slow nod. “Okay.”

And that’s that.

The receptionist doesn’t bat an eye at him, Kevin’s tag-along unregistered roommate, being present at checkout, and soon he's ducking into the passenger seat, feeling automatically for the seat slider so his knees won’t punch his chest.

Kevin is a very good driver. He signals even when there’s no one around, does head-checks, stops at every stop sign, and follows the speed limit with an awe-inspiring precision. His turns are smooth and he always grasps the wheel at three and nine.

It’s kind of terrifying.

“So,” he says, merging smoothly onto the highway. “Ready for some existential crap?”

Oh. Haha. Very funny. “Actually, I was thinkin’ maybe you could tell me a little bit about yourself first. Like, who the hell are you, why were you in the hospital. Stuff like that.”

Kevin shoots him a look out of the corner of his eye, but doesn’t seem offended. Michael is maybe a little disappointed. “Yeah. I guess that makes sense.” He takes a deep breath, then sighs. “I’m Kevin. Kevin Tran. I guess my current job is travelling around the country, helping people out with… problems.”

“Yeah? What kind of problems?”

“Monster problems.” He seems to be completely aware of how ridiculous he sounds. “Sometimes demon problems.”

“So you’re… some kind of exorcist?”

“Not really. It’s – complicated. You could probably say I’m a cross between pest control, a hunter, and…” His fingers drum on the steering wheel. “A detective, I guess. For all your spooky needs. Exorcisms, banishments, weird murders, kids who summon a vengeful spirit to beat up the class bully, you name it, I deal with it.”

“Uh-huh,” he says slowly. “And that girl last night?”

“It’s not a particularly OSHA-friendly career. She was attacked by a vampire. We almost didn’t get there in time.”

“A _vampire?_ Like Dracula? Count von Count, that kind of vampire?”

“Honestly, yeah, like Dracula. It sounds stupid, but they do drink blood, and they have sharp-ass teeth, and they still look pretty much human.” He gives him that side-look again. “Don’t believe me?”

He shrugs. Honestly, not really, but he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. “I can’t die, apparently, so who am I to say that vampires don’t exist?”

That gets him a grim chuckle. “Yeah. No kidding.”

“So what’s weird about me?” He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “Am I a vampire or something?”

“If you were, I would be decapitating you, not giving you a ride.”

“Fair.”

“It was hard to see through your – whatever your protective charm is. It kind of made the edges go fuzzy. But it’s like you have some kind of… I don’t know. Energy, I guess. To be honest, I’d say it’s not entirely human, but I don’t know if that has implications for you, since we don’t know whether it’s a part of you or not.”

“What do you mean, ‘energy’?”

“It’s hard to explain. I can see things that normal people can’t. It’s not ESP, it’s not clairvoyance, it doesn’t work half the time, but when it’s obvious, I can kind of pick up on whether someone’s… off. Like if someone gets possessed, that’s a little more obvious to me than a normal person. But, again, whatever you have on is kind of messing with my antenna.”

He touches Martha’s pendant. “I stayed at someone’s place for a bit. She gave me an old traveler’s charm. I thought it was just a nice gesture.”

“See, that’s the thing. There are a lot of scary things out there. Not too many people believe in them, you know? So there are even fewer people who can actually defend themselves or other people from the things that go bump in the night. A lot of old stuff people believe about staying safe from supernatural dangers is complete bullshit, but when you come across something that works, it usually works really well.”

“Cool.”

“Mm-hm.”

Something occurs to him. “You said that hunting is your current job. What did you do before this? Were you just… some college kid?”

He laughs at that, a weird laugh that bubbles up from deep inside. “Nah. I never went to college. I didn’t even graduate high school. My old job title was ‘Prophet of the Lord.’” He takes a hand off the steering wheel to make sarcastic air quotes. “And before you ask, no, I wasn’t in a cult. I didn’t talk to God or anything. I just got mad Sumerian skills uploaded into my brain, and now I have a condition where I get migraines if I try to read anything more than two thousand years old.”

“So that’s why you can see… my energy?”

“Short story, yes. I knew what you were in the ER for, I knew no one would stop you from leaving, and I knew that there was something weird about you. And usually, people who just appear around me with that kind of off-ness about them? They want something. But you just kept going on about how you got hit by a car.”

“’Cause I did.”

“Yeah, I never doubted that,” Kevin says testily. “It just proved you had no idea what was going on. That was a good sign, to be clear. You weren’t out for my blood, and you weren’t asking for any favors.”

He leans back in his seat and groans. “Great. So I can’t die, I have weird energy, and no clue who I am or where I’m from. And that’s a good thing, apparently.”

“Well, you know your name. Michael. Somehow Minnesota is important. Anything else?”

“I know my mom, I guess. Her name’s Kate.”

“Kate.” Kevin hums. “Michael and Kate from Minnesota. Cases have been built on less.” He arches an eyebrow. “You’re taking this pretty well, by the way. Usually people start yelling at this point.”

Honestly, there’s a faint part of his brain that _is_ freaking out, but mostly he just feels dazed. Like he’s stepped into fantasyland and suddenly every creepy-crawly and cryptid has come to life, and all he can think is, _Yeah, sure. Of course. Might as well._ “I don’t know. Either you’re a world-class scam artist, or you can actually help me figure out what the hell’s going on. I have no connections and nothing to lose, and you can’t kill me, as far as I know, so yeah, I’ll bite on the whole freakshow deal.”

Kevin laughs again. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been around the block before.”

“Well, if I had, I wouldn’t remember, would I?”

“Good point.”

The faint panic has settled down and morphed into curiosity. Michael turns in his seat to look at Kevin straight on. “So, are zombies real?”

Kevin makes a face. “Not zombies per se, but there are things that eat people and are undead and stuff.”

He processes this for a moment. “How about… fairies?”

Kevin snorts. “Real. Pain in the neck, but real.”

“Leprechauns?”

“A type of fairy.”

“Werewolves?”

 _“Very_ real.”

“Mothman?”

“Strangely enough, the jury’s still out on that one.”

“Bloody Mary?”

“Dead, but real.”

“You _killed_ Bloody Mary?”

“Not me,” Kevin says, a hint of amusement in his voice. “A couple of guys I know.”

Michael folds his arms and leans in. “How about Godzilla?”

He shakes his head. “Godzilla’s fake.”

“Oh. That’s good to know.”

They lapse into silence. Michael fidgets. The trees whiz by, and they’re starting to share the road with tankers and moving vans.

“So you really don’t remember anything?”

The question comes so suddenly that he doesn’t really understand it the first time. “What?”

Kevin shrugs. “I mean, you wouldn’t happen to remember any phone numbers, would you? It would make this a lot easier if you did.”

“No. Dude, I have amnesia.”

“Yeah, I know, but you remember _some_ things. Like, you know your mom, and you probably know your dad. Maybe you have some kind of a – a sense for where you guys lived.”

As if cued, the memory surfaces again – she had blond hair and soft hands, tired eyes, a warm smile.

“Uh, yeah,” Michael says. “We live – lived – alone. My dad was kind of gone, I guess.”

“Sucks,” Kevin says with a note of sympathy in his voice. “I know the feeling. My mom could take care of herself, though. She was tough as nails.”

 _Her sharp teeth sink into his belly and his muscles spasm all at once as she comes away with a mouthful of flesh. It hurts so bad that he can’t breathe, she must be ripping his stomach out, and he knows the man who’s holding him down, he was a cop and – and he’s laughing, he knows that laugh, her smile is wrong wrong wrong all blood-stained teeth and_ do you want a bite, brother?

“Hey, Michael? Are you okay?”

Somehow, even though the muscles in his neck are suddenly immobile steel, he manages to nod.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know what I said about updating "in a few months," but I finally managed to watch The Episode and was motivated to clean up this chapter. I guess I have mixed feelings about it? Great performances, but if we're all supposed to have closure after a single episode, man, I dunno. Anyway! Hope this provides some intrigue. I still can't promise a consistent update schedule, although I currently have about ~30k+ more written that needs to be made presentable before posting, so who knows!


	4. the revenant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A familiar place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ***content warning for graphic, and I DO mean graphic, victim-POV descriptions of cannibalism. if you watched "Jump the Shark," you already know what's up. skip the second to last section if you need to.***
> 
> thanks for your lovely comments so far! hope you enjoy this chapter. we're ramping up!

They drive for hours, stopping occasionally to fill the tank – Kevin pays in cash at the counter – and finally stop to eat at a dingy Taco Bell attached to a gas station. Kevin’s a vegan, Michael learns, so he practically worships the place, and Michael lets him order for both of them. It’s another few hours to the middle of Minnesota, and by then the sky is dark and their way is lit by street lamps. Kevin powers through an entire performance of _Peter and the Wolf_ by the Russian National Orchestra (according to the display on his beat-up mp3 player).

Somehow, they don’t bring up his mother again until they check into a shabby motel for the night under fake names. Their room smells like smoke and one of the two wall-fixed lamps is broken. Michael sits on the bed closest to the door and then falls onto his back, listening to the rusty springs squawk under him. Kevin kicks off his shoes and slings his duffel on the floor next to the bed near the window, then heads into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. And then he sits down on his bed and checks his cell phone for messages. And then he asks Adam a question.

“You sure searching for it is a good idea? You kinda had an… episode in the car earlier.”

That’s something he doesn’t want to think about.

_Teeth._

“I’m fine.”

Kevin surveys him and clearly doubts what he’s saying, but switches the topic anyway, maybe because he’s feeling considerate. “Okay. Well, it seems like you’re getting a lot of your subconscious memory back, or something. I mean, you know about Godzilla, you know about Taco Bell.”

“I know about Stranger Danger,” Michael says, although he tastefully omits the fact that he doesn’t know exactly what it’s referencing.

“Right. And you definitely remember how to hand out the lip,” Kevin says, rolling his eyes. “But that’s a good sign, right? Like, it’s all coming back.”

“Sure. I dunno. I just…” He doesn’t want to discuss specifics, but if getting his memories back means reliving _that_ all over again, maybe it’s not going to be a smooth ride. “What if I remember being a serial killer or something?”

Kevin grimaces. “I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Take a shower. It might help you feel better.”

Michael takes a shower and notes to himself that he needs to get more than one change of clothes. He can’t keep wearing Kevin’s hoodie forever. When he brings this up, Kevin yawns and nods and says they’ll take care of it in the moment, which makes Michael ask him how much money he makes off of “hunting,” to which Kevin replies “not much,” which begs the question of how he can afford to buy strangers clothes, and Kevin rolls his eyes and says, “I guess you don’t remember Goodwill,” and Michael closes the door to the bathroom before he can hear any more smart remarks.

Kevin’s a nice guy. When Michael is done with his shower, he towels off and pulls on his sweatpants and falls asleep instantly on the other bed, then wakes up thrashing out of his bedsheets.

“Calm down, calm down,” Kevin hisses, grabbing him by the shoulders. Something in his brain snaps back into place and he chills out, taking deep breaths while Kevin turns the lamp on and sits down across from him, rubbing his eyes. Michael untangles himself from his sheets and sits up, head suddenly throbbing.

“Think I had a nightmare,” he offers feebly.

The prophet of the Lord or whatever rolls his eyes and scratches his stubbly chin. “No, you remembered something. I could tell. What was it?”

Michael squints in the half-light and combs through the memory like it’s so many pieces of shattered glass.

“I remember the house.”

* * *

Kevin, after grouching back to sleep for a few hours, wakes up and nabs breakfast for them, then pulls up Windom on his laptop on Google Maps and clicks around in Street View for a futile twenty minutes. They can’t find his house, but Kevin’s pretty confident that they’ll be able to find it just driving around there, because it’s such a small goddamn town.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t really trigger any recall for Michael. Nothing looks familiar.

“Look, I gotta ask… do you really want to go back? Like, are you sure that’s where you and your mom lived, or is it just where you died?”

He doesn’t really want to think about that, but Windom is the only place-name he remembers right now. Where is he going to go if not there? He doesn’t really want to drive around with Kevin forever – sure, he’s a nice guy, but his day job involves shanking actual vampires. And to be honest, he wants to be someplace familiar so he can start _remembering_ things, not just sudden flashes of whatever. He knows the missing parts of him are out there, somewhere.

“Yeah,” he says, finally. “I mean, what else am I supposed to do?”

“All right,” Kevin says quietly. “You sure you don’t have anyone to stay with? Do you know your dad’s name?”

Funnily enough, he does. “John.”

Kevin chuckles. “That’s not much to go on, you know.”

He tries to summon up a memory, any memory. All he gets is _John and Mom._ But suddenly there’s a picture.

“He had a beard,” he says. “Dark hair. Uh, green eyes. Always wore heavy jackets and jeans. Kinda blue-collar getup.”

“Not much to go on,” Kevin says. “Well, if we’re on this train of thought anyway, do you remember what’s so bad in Windom?”

He doesn’t exactly know how to phrase this without sounding delusional but then he considers that he’s an amnesiac who woke up in the woods and was taken in by an old couple before hitching a ride back home with freaking Father Callahan. Whoever that is.

“Getting eaten alive,” he says.

Kevin cocks his head and says, “What?”

“I know, I know, I’m still alive, and I’m pretty sure all my parts are in place, but I just have this partial memory of – like. Sharp teeth.” He thinks he might actually puke right now, not that it would make a difference because the motel room carpet is just that nauseous shade of mystery lunch special, and it obviously shows in his voice because Kevin huffs out a breath.

“That sucks,” he says.

“A little,” Michael grumps, but Kevin ignores him.

“It might have been a ghoul.”

“A what now?”

“A spirit that takes on the forms of the people it eats,” Kevin explains as fast as he can, as if that will somehow mitigate the fact that he is literally confirming the existing of flesh-eating shapeshifting zombies as they speak. “Most of them go for corpses, but someone told me about a case forever ago where they started going after people who were still alive. It probably ate your mom and then… uh.”

He clamps his mouth shut, obviously thinking that it is not a good idea to tell Michael too much about the literal slasher-film-level gorefest that probably played itself out in his house. Too late. Michael dashes off to the bathroom to puke up his breakfast and Kevin makes a distressed noise from his place on the bed.

“Everything sucks,” Michael groans when he finishes dispensing of his McMuffin. “I can’t even remember it and I know it sucks.”

From the bedroom, Kevin makes a sympathetic noise. “I don’t know how you survived that. I mean, I know what I said, but maybe it didn’t eat your mom. Maybe she survived.”

A chill runs down his spine. No, probably not. The feeling of his guts getting pulled out like a chain of scarves says it was impossible for him to survive. And yet here he is. “You think she could have been brought back to life?”

Kevin walks over to the door and leans on it, arms folded. “I mean, resurrection isn’t out of the question. It’s happened before.”

“Jesus doesn’t count.”

“To people I personally know,” he clarifies. “And probably to you. Is that so hard to believe? Vampires, witches, and werewolves exist, but people can’t come back from the dead?”

Michael scoots back against the sink and lets his head fall back against the cabinet doors. “I guess you have a point. But I don’t know what that means, if I did.”

Kevin seems to think a little bit, biting the side of his lip. “It doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything. It’s just that usually, when this happens, it’s because someone else planned it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen spontaneously before. Heaven and Hell and the other parties involved are pretty possessive of souls.”

“I have idea why anyone would want to bring me back from the dead. I mean, my mom’s MIA, I got no clue what my dad’s up to…”

“Girlfriend?” Kevin guesses. “Boyfriend?”

He shrugs, scratching his head. “If I had one, I don’t think it was serious enough for necromancy, or I’d probably have remembered something by now.”

Kevin grimaces and shuts his laptop. “This is the kind of mystery I’d rather unpack on the road. It should only be a couple of hours until we get to your place, anyway.”

Michael’s stomach does a flip. Now that the purpose of his journey north actually has an end goal, and a very specific ETA, he’s getting some jitters. What the hell are they going to find? Is his brain just shutting down his memory because it’s protecting him from some really bad stuff?

Fingers snap in front of his face. “Hey, eyes up front. We’re going to check out.”

“Right,” he says, and hoists the duffel bag over his shoulder, heading out to the car.

* * *

He’s perched on the trunk when Kevin comes back from the front desk, and tosses him the keys. Kevin catches them in his free hand and sticks his tongue out.

“Sorry. Lady at the front was really chatty. Guess they don’t see a lot of Asians this far out from the Twin Cities.”

Michael doesn’t really know what to say to that, so he just shrugs and ducks into the passenger seat.

His vampire-hunting chauffeur quickly finds his way onto the highway going south, and from there he practically cruises. Once they’re firmly lodged in the flow of traffic, Kevin taps his fingers on the steering wheel and asks, “You remember your street address or anything?”

Michael digs around. He doesn’t really remember numbers, but if he focuses he can catch the tail of a memory as it flees and bring it into view. White siding, gray shutters. Gray roofing tiles, almost black in the rain. No fence, a small yard with a broken concrete birdbath.

“I kind of remember what it looked like,” he says.

“I can’t drive around Windom looking for a house in the suburbs. Everything looks the same. Can you remember, like, a house number?”

He tries. He really does. He can’t make it out, can’t keep the memory in his head long enough. It skitters around, like it doesn’t want to be exposed to his scrutiny.

Kevin sighs. “Okay. Well, keep trying. We won’t be there for, like, another two hours.”

His head falls back against the seat as he watches the scenery roll by. He doesn’t really remember what he used to listen to, if anything. He knows he’s not at home with Kevin’s collection of rare performances of, like, _Swan Lake._ Speaking of which –

“Hey, uh, how’d you get into the whole monster-hunting thing, anyway? You don’t seem like the type. You told me about the whole prophet thing, but you’re retired from that, right?”

Kevin’s silent for a moment before he asks, “What do you mean?”

“I dunno. Well, you listen to classical music, you’re not really... you don’t look like the kind of guy who goes around stabbing creatures of the night. No offense, I guess.”

“What kind of person does?”

“I dunno.”

“You expected some kinda backwoods guy in jeans and flannel and a camo jacket?” There’s a hint of amusement in Kevin’s voice and it doesn’t go unnoticed.

“Uh. Maybe?”

“Well, there are some like that,” Kevin says. “I know a couple myself. You don’t get very far without knowing people, and there aren’t very many of us to get to know. But I guess I just work differently. I didn’t grow up like they did. I wasn’t a tough kid, physically speaking.”

“Top of your class?”

“Always. GT, Honors, AP, whole nine yards. I was applying to colleges, and bam,” he said. “My whole life changed. Propheteering. But eventually I learned to hunt, and… well. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

Adam counts in his head. “Applying to college? Means you were a junior. So you were, like, sixteen.”

“Sixteen and a bunch of months, but who’s counting.”

“Did you have a family?”

“Just my mom. She passed a couple of years ago. It was peaceful, though. No monster, no spirit, nothing. Just... normal. It’s basically unheard of for a hunter who has any family left, but she could keep herself safe. She knew a couple of tricks. I had some cousins, too, but we never really kept in contact.”

“Sounds like a wonderful time.”

“She was a good mother. Knew how to push me, knew when I needed sympathy and when I needed to get my ass in gear. It wasn’t all sunshine but I wouldn’t change it for a thing.”

“Where were you applying?”

He shrugs. “I don’t really remember. It’s been, what, nine, ten years? Probably Princeton, Harvard, Cal Tech, Cal Poly, Duke, MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, that kind of stuff. I had the grades for it. Didn’t get to write my application essay, though. That’s when all of this started hitting all at once.”

“Must have felt like the end of the world.”

Kevin laughs. It’s a weird laugh, like he’s sad and amused and a little bitter. “Kinda. It was an interesting time. But, hey, you’re supposed to be finding things out about yourself, right? I should be asking the questions.”

“Ask away, Regis.” Who the hell is Regis?

“So. Your name is Michael, you’re from Windom, Minnesota, you’re a big fan of _Who Wants to Be a Millionaire._ You used to live with your mom, who’s not around anymore. Is all that right?”

“Pretty much.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Uh, dunno. I don’t think I have one.”

“Okay, how about favorite food?”

“Probably don’t have one of those, either.”

“Favorite animal?”

“Dogs?”

“Dude, why are you asking me?”

(He remembers dogs, actually. A new memory lifts itself out of the blankness. He’s at his friend Collin’s house, and they’ve got this huge yellow Labrador, the friendliest thing in the world, bowling him over when he walks in the door. At first he’s scared stiff, but then the dog starts licking his face and he laughs partly out of surprise and partly because the dog is so enthusiastic about it. Dog breath is everywhere, though, and he’s a little relieved when Collin calls Ilanna off and the dog bounds over to him, giving him the exact same treatment.)

“A friend of mine had a Labrador. Pretty big, or maybe it was because I was a kid. Dogs have been pretty cool to me since then.”

“Dogs. Okay. What’s your mom’s name?”

This one’s harder. He knows this one, like brushing off an old photograph found in the pages of an old book. It’s fuzzy and grainy and hard to make out because it’s so old, but he knows:

“Kate. Her name was Kate. She never took my dad’s name. It’s – just Milligan, I guess.”

“Kate and Michael Milligan.” Kevin beams. “That’s a better frame of reference than your house.”

* * *

Kevin keeps chipping at the blank slate that covers his memories as they drive. Nothing surfaces that’s anywhere near the one that screwed up his brain for hours, the flash of which he has locked firmly in the back of his head and refuses to revisit.

He went to the University of Wisconsin. He was nineteen. He could swim. He was a lifeguard once at the community pool. Drove a pickup.

They’re like echoes from a past life. He remembers bits and pieces but they don’t really feel like him. It’s almost like childhood amnesia – there’s just nothing that far back because he’s lost it. There’s still a huge blank space blanketing everything from his death to the time he woke up in the field. He knows there’s something there. It wasn’t just nothing. If it’s memories of heaven, or hell, or wherever people go when they die, that’s a part of him too, now, and he doesn’t like it when things are hidden from him.

He learns things about Kevin, too. Kevin Tran has been a hunter for nine years. He was once on the fast track to Princeton but a world-threatening cataclysm turned that into a pipe dream. He still keeps in touch with some friends, although he doesn’t mention any names. He can recite the first thirty digits of pi, phi, and gamma, is basically an encyclopedia of obscure monster facts, is a vegan, played the cello at one point. His favorite composer is Shostakovich, he’s been officially missing since he was sixteen, and he visits his mom’s grave – she was cremated – whenever he’s around.

Kevin’s genuinely a nice guy. It’s kind of astonishing, considering that his career path seems to be tailored to make people seriously dysfunctional. He’s open, but has boundaries, makes conversation like it’s the only thing in the world that’s worthwhile but lets silence be silence. All while possibly being the most perfect driver Adam has ever seen. No rolling stops, always signals a left turn. He even signals when he’s turning out of a parking space. And for the life of him he can’t figure out why the guy has such a gigantic heart. It’s like he’s a real-life Care Bear except with more stomping out evil with an arsenal of specialized weaponry. He’s seen Kevin’s trunk and he’s pretty sure the guy would never make it through customs anywhere.

And for what? He’s just some amnesiac dude who happened to meet him while he was on the job. By all rights he should be back in Ohio walking from town to town begging for scraps like a wide-eyed Dickensian orphan. He could be a ghoul. He could be _lying_ to him and Kevin just takes everything he says at face-value and _trusts him_. He’s pretty sure a life of paranoia and violence isn’t supposed to produce that kind of person, and yet here he is, riding along the interstate with him like old pals.

Well, there is some distance. Kevin engages him but doesn’t _engage_ him. They’re not exactly having a heart-to-heart, here, which he’s glad for, but at the same time Kevin maintains a vast amount of emotional distance between them and it would be kind of frightening if he wasn’t so friendly. It’s because he says everything the same way – his voice never drops into sadness. His face is always a little distant, and he talks like he’s relating a story someone told him a long time ago. The more they talk, the more Michael runs into barriers that prevent him from getting a good look at this guy.

It’s weird but Michael decides not to press. It’s a high-stakes job and there are probably reasons why their conversations don’t go through a predictable emotional range. He doesn’t want Kevin to knife him and then dump his body on the side of the road because he pressed the wrong button.

Things around them start to seem familiar. Street signs, houses, the distances between turns. He doesn’t even realize he’s tensed up until his arm starts to ache, and he unclenches his hands and takes a deep breath. His nails have left red crescent marks on his palms. He can’t pin the source of his anxiety down because he doesn’t _remember,_ except for that one thing he does not will not cannot think about which is beating at the makeshift walls he’s put around it.

Windom is suburbs and farmland, but mostly farmland, so they pass long stretches of bare fields, brown dirt and withered stalks. More houses appear as they head to the center of the city, and at some point he begins to give Kevin instructions, which Kevin doesn’t question. It’s a gut thing. Turn left here. Pass two lights and take a right. Left here. _It’s the fifth house down._

It is so, so familiar, the rows of houses that aren’t quite uniform, the quiet neighborhood with open lawns, tall trees everywhere. The city is laid out like a grid, cut through with the serene Des Moines River. He _knows_ this like the back of his hand, flashes of memories. Walking to school in the morning darkness, festivals by the river, Cousin Oliver’s Diner, the auto parts store. The car dealership where he got his pickup. It does nothing to stop his gut from tying itself in knots.

They actually miss the house the first time they drive past it, so Kevin has to make another trip around the block to make sure he knows where they’ll walk to. He leaves the car in a church parking lot and then they’re walking, insisting that Michael turn up his collar so it’ll be harder to recognize him, and Michael is leading the way.

The sky is blue and the air is cold and biting. His feet move independent of his thoughts. It’s like he’s been transported back to high school and he’s just a sixteen-year-old kid with a knack for biology.

His house looks the same. Exactly the same. If Kevin hadn’t told him he’d been – well, dead, he assumes – for the past twelve years, he’d have just walked right up to the door and tried to let himself in. His house is still three levels, one aboveground, a small attic, and a basement, with three windows and a door facing the road. The broken bird bath in the yard is still there. The shutters are still open. The siding is still in need of a new paint job. And his stomach is still as heavy as stone.

Kevin lets him stand there for a few moments, presumably watching for a sign of head-leakage or a psychotic break from reality. When nothing happens, he relaxes and looks around the neighborhood.

“It’s a quiet town,” he says. “I like it.”

Michael nods. “It’s… it was, uh, home. You know.”

“Yeah, I know. When my mom died, she didn’t leave the house to anyone, so there’s another family living there now. Good folks.”

He’s silent for a while. The lack of – anything, terror, even nostalgia, even homesickness, terrifies him. It’s like he’s not quite in himself, like he’s wearing someone else’s skin and looking at someone else’s house through their eyes, with a whole slew of dormant memories waiting to burst into his consciousness like a trauma volcano.

The cold air settles in his jacket and a chill races down his spine.

“You wanna knock on the door, see if you can take a look inside?”

“I don’t think so,” he says uncertainly.

Kevin gives the house a once-over, without much expression, and nods. “Okay. You wanna wait down the street while I do some recon?”

Michael doesn’t understand what he means at first. “What, are you going to break in? The last memories I have are from, like, ten or eleven years ago. You’re not going to find my toy chest or whatever.”

He receives a withering stare. “If anyone’s home, I’d want to talk to them. If it’s someone from around here, I wouldn’t want you showing your face at the door anyway. Do you want to unlock your brain or not?”

“Honestly, the jury’s out on that one,” Michael says, but heads to the end of the block anyway.

For about ten minutes, Michael twiddles his thumbs at the end of the block. Windom is old, woodsy suburbia, which feels familiar, but his memories of riding his bike down the block or killing ants in the driveway or whatever else it is kids do have remained firmly under lock and key. You’d think that an amnesiac visiting his hometown for the first time in ten years would have his brain blasted open, but no.

Kevin returns and they proceed back to the car to debrief. He looks pensive. It can’t be good news.

“It’s a good thing that old lady was a gossip and a half,” he sighs, swinging the driver’s side door shut. Michael buckles in. “I asked after you and your mom, but she’s from the next town over, so she wouldn’t have known you two. She says the last owners of the house were murdered. Seemed weirdly proud that she was brave enough to move into a property like that.”

“Murdered,” Michael repeats. The word feels weird and unwieldy on his tongue. Maybe it’s just cold. “Did she tell you how?”

“I mean, I’d think you were the expert in that area,” Kevin says, grimacing.

“Well, yeah, but you said people don’t really believe in cannibalistic ghouls and vampires and stuff,” he insists. “There has to be an official story.”

“If there is, we’ll have to look through obits and stuff.”

Michael shrugs. “Where do we find that?”

“Should’ve done this before we left, but you said the last year you remember is 2010, right? If you were murdered, there’s no way that escaped press coverage. And, lucky for you, there were probably articles posted online about it. All we need is some free wifi.”

“And if that doesn’t work out?”

“Library, town hall. I can talk to the cops if we need to, but I’d rather not.”

He takes a deep breath, looking around at the bare trees and dry, yellow lawns. Across the street, a wind chime clinks in the breeze. Something is beginning to creep in. “Okay. Where do we find wifi?”

* * *

They end up getting lunch first at Cousin Oliver’s Diner, which he vaguely remembers, as if through a haze. He’s probably been here a hundred times and just doesn’t know it. Kevin is staring morosely at a menu when the waitress who seated them asks Michael his name and if they’ve met before.

“Uh, no, I don’t think we have,” he says, and reaches out to shake her hand. Why is he shaking her hand? “I’m Michael.”

“I’m sorry, you just remind me of someone,” she replies, tapping her pen against her chin. “Are you all set to order?”

Kevin stares over the menu at him like a hunter watching a deer as he orders. Hey, he’s doing much better than the first time. He remembers what drinks are, and stuff. Burger and fries.

“So,” Kevin says when he’s halfway through his salad. “This kind of depends on what we find, but I don’t think you should stick around here too long.”

“Why?”

He wipes his mouth with his napkin and folds his hands thoughtfully. “That waitress almost recognized you. You’re a murder victim, and until we know whether they found an identifiable body, we don’t want to raise any suspicion.”

“Of what?” Michael sets his burger down on the plate and puts his elbow on the table. “Look, what if someone does recognize me? If I’m officially dead, it doesn’t matter. I can just say I’m not the guy who died. It’s not like they’re going to arrest me for being alive.”

“Okay, this is why you need me along on this investigation,” Kevin sighs. “Do you know why I’m always checking into hotels with fake names?”

“No offense, Kev, but you seem like you have, y’know, a criminal history.”

“Well, I guess that’s technically true, but more importantly, there are supernatural beings – like ghouls, for instance – that pose as normal human beings. Angels, demons, vampires—”

“Werewolves,” Michael supplies helpfully.

“Yes, and werewolves. The point is, if you’re tangled up in something supernatural, and we think someone might have brought you back, we have no reason to think it was done with your interests in mind. We don’t know anything about you, and that makes other people dangerous.”

“Why doesn’t it make _me_ dangerous?”

“You might be.” Kevin shrugs and stabs through a crouton with his fork. “Lucky me, if so.”

“So… wouldn’t it be a better bet for you to just turn me loose and jet?” Kevin gives him a look, so he clarifies. “Not that I’d want you to, just… I guess it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Kevin takes his time chewing his mouthful of rabbit food, all the while giving him a very thoughtful look. Then he swallows and says, “I don’t know. I guess I feel bad for you. I was dragged into this business against my will as a kid. Maybe I don’t want that to happen to you, too.”

Michael wants to tag him back with a retort (he may be an amnesiac who woke up naked in the woods and got hit by a soccer mom driving a minivan, but he’s not a child) but the apparent exhaustion on Kevin’s face makes him think twice about it. They both feel like shit. Who cares why he’s helping? What else is there to do?

“Thanks, I think,” he says instead.

“Yeah, sure.”

Kevin pays in cash and pushes Michael out the door in front of him before the waitress can come around and stare at them again, and then they drive to the library.

* * *

Before they bother the librarians, Kevin opens his laptop in a study area away from prying eyes and pulls up Windom’s local newspaper, which is hosted on a crowded and clunky-looking website.

“At least they had the decency to put the search bar at the top of the column,” Kevin grouses, and types in the search term MURDER.

No results.

“’Kay.” He tries MILLIGAN next.

There are a couple results. The website archives articles from all over Cottonwood County, so there are a few Milligans that he’s pretty sure aren’t him. There’s no mention of his mom, either.

Kevin hems and haws for a bit before following a hunch and taking a look at the Minnesota missing persons clearinghouse website. A quick CTRL+F search brings up one Milligan.

 _Milligan, Katherine – Missing Person  
_ _Missing from: Windom, MN  
_ _Missing since: 3/29/2009  
_ _Current age: 56_

The picture is most likely cribbed from her driver’s license. She has blonde hair, an oval-shaped face, fair skin, and a slight smile.

He remembers. Her hand holding his as they walked to the local park, the times he’d find her passed out on the couch in the morning with the TV still on, the day she took him to pick out his first (well-used) car, the way she’d hug him tight like she was squeezing the last bit out of a tube of toothpaste.

The feeling of loneliness hits him like a baseball bat. He can’t even see her picture anymore through the sudden tears.

Kevin slides the laptop away awkwardly. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah,” he manages. “That’s her. That’s my mom. I guess they never found a body.”

“I can’t find a press release about it, so it might have just popped up on the evening news or something,” Kevin muses. “I think this is as far as the internet will take us.”

After a brief but vicious fight, the tears subside, and Michael takes a deep breath. “Okay. What… what do we do next?”

“The police deal with missing persons. So I guess you’re going to have to sit this one out. If you looked ‘familiar’ to a waitress, rinky-dink town cops will definitely be able to ID you.”

“So I just sit in the car for an hour? Won’t that look suspicious?”

“There’s no safer place. That thing is spooky-proofed. Crank the seat down, take a nap. We’ll be done in no time.”

Michael sighs and rubs his eyes. “All right. If you say so.”

“Okay. Well… let me run a couple more searches.”

Kevin types in WINDOM this time, and another name pops up:

 _Barton, Joseph – Missing Person  
_ _Missing from: Windom, MN  
_ _Missing since: 3/20/2009  
_ _Current age: 76_

“Nine days before your mom,” he says. “Huh. What are the chances?”

There’s an alarm going off in Michael’s head, but at a distance. “It does sound suspicious.”

He runs another search on Google for “michael milligan,” switching from “missing” to “dead” to no avail. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – either his accounts have already been deleted, or he just didn’t have a social media presence.

When he points this out, Kevin nods. “I believe it. You seem like that kind of guy.”

“How?” Something inside him says he should be offended.

“I don’t know, you just do.” Kevin has a little laugh to himself and shuts his laptop. “Okay. Cop time. Good thing I shaved today, I’m gonna need a minute to change.”

* * *

Kevin leaves him in charge of watching the gas pump while he takes his bag into the gas station bathroom. After a few minutes, during which the pump handle clicks and stops dispensing gas, he re-emerges in a slightly-wrinkled, slightly-too-large suit and tie.

“Nice costume.”

“Buzz off. We’re gonna have to stop at a secondhand store today so you’re not running around looking like you just got out of bed.”

“Well, no need to rip on your own clothes.”

“Get in the car, Mikey.”

“Do _not_ call me that,” he grouses, but gets into the passenger seat anyway.

The police department is a squat red brick building that looks extremely inoffensive, and he’s about to protest being left in the car again before he remembers Martha talking about her no-cops hunch. Out of respect for the old lady whose son’s stuff he lost, he is nice and quiet and stays in the car twiddling his fingers while Kevin marches off to bamboozle the boys in blue.

A lot of things are coming back to him now, almost by reflex. Little cultural references and stuff that seem normal, logical, like everyone should know them. That seems to be a good sign. It would be great if he could remember things. If he remembered this town, where he grew up, apparently, unless he’s the ghoul that ate the real Michael Milligan and is just getting the taste of a dead man’s memories.

That’s not ideal.

When Kevin returns and turns the car back on, it’s been a full forty-five minutes. He looks pensive, and doesn’t say anything until Michael prompts him to.

“Did you find out anything?”

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Sorry, I’m just trying to process. Um… let’s park somewhere else before we talk. Maybe grab some coffee? I dunno.”

The silence in the car is deafening. Whatever he found out couldn’t have been good, or at least not mostly good. Michael tries to focus on the buildings they pass, to see if they trigger any new memories. They don’t. Eventually, Kevin pulls up in front of a place with a hand-painted signboard that says _Cottonwood Café Breakfast All Day_ in precise red letters. They nab a seat in the corner, away from the counter and the one teenage girl texting there, two untouched black coffees standing between them on the table.

“So I confirmed that your mom is still considered a missing person,” he says finally, drawing his coffee cup towards him. “But that’s only because they couldn’t find a body. There was a lot of blood in the basement and signs of a struggle – broken lamp, drag marks, severed restraints – but there was no one there. They scoured the surrounding area for miles without finding any sign of a burial site. According to the cops, it’s likely that her body was taken and disposed of across county lines. They had no idea where to start, since no one could think of anyone with a real motive to kill her.”

Michael nods numbly. It’s nothing he didn’t expect, but hearing it confirmed is… different. “Okay. And you think something different?”

“I do. Since I know you were killed by ghouls, I’m fairly certain she was, too. Ghouls usually feed on corpses, but I’ve heard they’re not beyond going for live victims. So it probably… ate her, hid the bones where it knew the cops wouldn’t look – like the local graveyard – and took off again to find someone else to eat.”

“Jesus.” He leans back in his chair. It’s difficult to take the deep breath he knows he needs.

“Yeah. Sorry. I wish there was a more likely way she could have gone, but… that’s all I have on that.”

_Sharp teeth. Do you want a bite, brother?_

“Okay. Yeah. Um, thanks. For digging around. You didn’t have to.” His words ring hollow. He’s not sure what he’s feeling right now.

“Don’t thank me yet, dude.” Kevin takes a sip of coffee, and he seems nervous, although Michael can’t even begin to guess why. “You were right. Kate Milligan had one son.”

“Yeah. Me.”

“His name was Adam,” he says, and watches Michael’s face for a reaction before he continues. “Adam Milligan. And wouldn’t you know it, he went missing around the same time while he was at the University of Wisconsin. No body. I looked him up, and he’s registered in the Wisconsin clearinghouse instead of Minnesota.”

He turns his phone on and slides it across to Michael, who picks it up and reads the screen. It takes a few moments of blank staring before his brain registers the contents.

Below a black-and-white picture of a kid who looks exactly like him – short light hair, long face, wide eyes, strong chin, high cheekbones – is written:

 _Last Name: Milligan  
_ _First Name: Adam  
_ _Missing Since: 4/5/2009  
_ _Age Now: 30  
_ **_VIEW POSTER: Milligan_Adam.pdf_ **

It’s him. There’s no denying that it’s him. But there’s no way it can be. His name _isn’t_ Adam.

“No middle name registered,” Kevin says cautiously. “So. Do you have any idea what’s up with that?”

“I don’t remember that name.” He shrugs. What else is there to say? “I’m not thirty, either.”

“Yeah. If you died in – wait, how would you remember it was 2010 if you’ve been missing since 2009?”

The math takes a moment to sink in.

“I must’ve been mistaken.”

“No, here’s the thing, dude. I don’t think you were. You have, like, five memories total, and I don’t think you’ve been misremembering anything. Your story has been pretty consistent, and that means you have about a year of missing time.”

The doubts in the car come rushing back, along with a familiar pressure at the back of his eyes. “If I’m even me.”

Kevin’s brow furrows. “You’re not seriously thinking you’re the ghoul, right?”

He shrugs again, rubbing at his eyes. “What’s to say that I’m not?”

“How long has it been since you woke up the first time?”

“About a month.”

“Yeah, okay. If you’re a supernatural creature, you’re not a ghoul, because ghouls need to continue to feed from the same body to maintain their appearance. Have you been eating corpses behind my back? Do you have some Adam Milligan jerky hidden in your pocket that I don’t know about?”

“Not fuckin’ funny, asshole,” he breathes, right before the nagging pressure in his head explodes into roaring fire and white light.

* * *

Officer Barton calls him to tell him that his mom is missing. He’s automatically terrified and Daisy Murphy, who is in his gen chem class and also studying with him right now for a quiz, calms him down a little bit by forcing him to sit down and tell her what’s going on. About fifteen minutes later she walks him to the parking lot near his dorm, tells him not to do anything stupid on the road, and waves goodbye as he tears out of Wisconsin and west toward Minnesota.

He doesn’t stop for breaks and it’s late in the night by the time he gets home, every permutation of every horrific scenario he can think of racing through his head. He desperately hopes beyond hope that he’ll walk right through that door and she’ll be standing there in her green scrubs, tired but healthy and whole and _there._ And she is. He can see her from the front door, standing in the kitchen, reading some news article from the local newspaper, and he runs to hug her.

“Adam,” she says, surprised but opening her arms. He buries his face in her hair. “Why are you home, honey? Did something happen at school?”

His voice is thick when he replies and he’s shaking with relief. “Officer Barton called me at school and told me you were missing, so I drove down here as soon as I could. God, Mom, I was scared out of my mind. What happened?”

She smiles, and it’s far too bright and clinical to be natural, with too many teeth, and he swings from relieved back to full-on alarm mode in the space of half a second.

“Poor dear,” she says, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Well, I’m here. I’m safe. Why don’t you rest up?”

And before he can ask any questions a hand clamps over his mouth and he’s being dragged down, down, and all that’s going through his head is _shit shit shit what’s going on what the fuck what happened to Mom oh god oh god oh god_. Something heavy slams down on his head and for a few good minutes all the thoughts are knocked out of his brain.

He comes to in – the basement. His mom is leaning against the door, arms crossed and a smirk on her face. There’s something in his mouth. He strains his eyes to see it but his head throbs and his vision goes fuzzy for a moment. He tries to spit the thing out but it’s elastic, and rough, and he comes to the conclusion that they’ve stuffed pantyhose in his mouth, and he barely manages to keep from retching, _this isn’t right this isn’t right what’s happening._ His arms have been tied behind the back of the chair he’s sitting on, and his ankles are duct taped to the legs of the chair. There’s a blue tarp laid out underneath him and he _knows_ they’re going to kill him. A chill settles in his stomach and his mouth goes dry.

She doesn’t walk like his mom when she paces over to him. Her gait is predatory, like a cat, and her eyes are hungry. And she doesn’t speak like his mom when she talks – the voice is the same but the cadence, the familiar rhythm, the soft clarity of it, all of that is gone. And Kate Milligan isn’t – isn’t—

Oh, _god._ That’s Officer Barton’s voice.

“He looks like you,” he says. “It’s the eyes.”

“I couldn’t care less who he looks like,” not-Kate-Milligan says, brushing a wisp of blonde hair behind her ear. He looks up at her as she stands in front of him. She glances down at him contemptuously before she speaks again. “But John Winchester made ’em cute, at least.”

He’s distracted from his pounding headache – _how do they know him?_ His dad’s just – he travels for his work, he’s not a criminal or anything, not that he knows of.

Not-Officer-Barton snorts. “You must’ve been proud.”

“She was,” not-Mom says, and all of a sudden she’s crouching down to look him in the eye, still ravenous. “Wasn’t I, sweetie? When you went away to college I told you to study hard and that no matter what, I’d always be proud of you, and you could come home whenever you wanted. _I’ll always be here if you need me._ I hope you remember that.”

It’s true. That’s almost word-for-word what she’d said once they’d moved all of his stuff into his dorm room. Then she’d kissed him on the forehead and hugged him and they’d said goodbye. _How does she know?_

Not-Mom breathes in deeply and he realizes that she’s _sniffing_ him and he feels so sick.

“Well. How about a taste?”

When she rolls up his sleeve he is expecting a lot of things, all of them unsavory, all of them making his guts churn in revulsion and fear, but he doesn’t expect her to produce a kitchen knife and draw it swiftly down, so fast that he doesn’t have enough time to flinch away. Pain lances freezing up his arm and for a moment all that exists is the screeching of his nerves, the distant feeling of blood welling up in the crook of his elbow, and the heave of his lungs as he tries to scream through the gag. She catches the blood in her mouth and starts _sucking_ at the wound like a leech and it feels like she’s ripping out his muscles and veins through the open wound and he can’t. stop. screaming. He tries to rip his arm away but not-Officer-Barton puts his hands on his shoulders, keeps him clamped down and he can’t move away from the pulling, burning _pain oh god it hurts._

When she drops his arm after an eternity of _blood so much blood why won’t it stop_ her mouth and chin are stained red, and that’s his blood dripping down her jaw, and he can’t breathe right. It’s too fast, too shallow, and the wound in his arm keeps gushing, pushing out everything he needs to survive. He’s not going to survive.

“Not bad,” she says, and stares into his eyes. “You’re a sweet kid.”

And _then_ he retches. It burns his throat and chokes him.

“Take the gag out, he’s going to suffocate,” she snaps. Not-Barton obliges, prying the stocking out of his mouth, and he heaves again, vomiting onto his own lap, eyes stinging. He feels like a kid. He doesn’t know what’s going on, he can’t control his body, he just puked all over himself like a toddler. And the thing with his mom’s face looks almost tenderly at him, cups his cheek in her hand.

“You’re doing great.”

He wants to throw up again but all he can manage is a pathetic dry heave. His lungs and throat are burning and the room is spinning around him. His body snaps back to attention as his bonds are severed and he tries to kick out against not-Barton but those old hands are like iron and he’s tossed on the floor like a heap of trash. It knocks the wind out of him and he manages to keep his chin tucked in so he doesn’t crack it open on the floor, but he can’t focus his eyes and he gasps for breath like a fish out of water. His attempt to get on his hands and knees and get _up_ is met with a foot planted on his chest, slowly crushing what little air he’s been able to hold onto out of his lungs. Not-Barton takes the knife and slices his other arm open and he gags because he can’t do anything else, the edges of his vision are going black and his arms are cold, aching bone-deep and sharp and not-Barton is drinking him like a beer. When the pressure on his chest disappears he breathes in so fast that he wheezes. He’s so dizzy. Everything _hurts._ Mom-not-Mom strokes his hair as Joe-Barton-not-really takes a deep pull from his arm. He’s crying. And everywhere the smell of vomit and blood and antiseptic.

She grins. She rucks up his shirt and he tries to get away from her but all he can manage is a terrified, hoarse scream and a pathetic wriggle.

Her sharp teeth sink into his belly and his muscles spasm all at once as she comes away with a mouthful of flesh. It hurts so bad that he can’t breathe, she must be ripping his stomach out – and not-Barton is laughing, he knows that laugh, her smile is wrong wrong wrong all blood-stained teeth she draws the knife across his stomach _do you want a bite, brother?_ and screaming, why isn’t anyone coming _, Mom help where’s John where’s my dad oh god please_ it feels like he’s spilling out of himself.

They eat him. At some point he stops screaming because his voice has dissolved into a whisper, and the gag is back in his mouth. His breath is ragged and insufficient. His arms and legs and head are motionless lead weights; he stares up at the ceiling, the fluorescent light and the pale blue paint, watches them multiply into three and lose their sharp edges. Numbly: _no one’s coming;_ and then, eventually: _let me die._ He barely registers when his body twitches and jerks and trembles of its own accord.

 _I’m dying,_ and then this again, _where…?_

His thoughts spiral into flashes of feeling, peeling away from the pain that saturates every nerve ending, and he’s waited for this, for the first time in his life he’s wanted it – it’s fading. It’s cold. His mother leans over him, her long hair matted with his blood, and color is gone, then shape, and he’s small, now, the size of a pinhead, small enough for a thousand angels to stand on, and then smaller even than that, and then he isn’t.

* * *

Adam Milligan wakes up in the back seat of Kevin Tran’s car, parked in the middle of nowhere, head still throbbing, face wet with tears.

“Hey,” Kevin says, twisted around in the driver’s seat. Adam props himself up on one elbow groggily, wiping his face down with the sleeve of his hoodie. “You ready to go to Goodwill?”

The weak joke startles a laugh out of him, and then suddenly he can’t stop laughing at the absurdity of it all. Adam Milligan, nineteen-no-twenty, missing a year, eaten alive by a ghoul in the shape of his mother and now back from the dead for some reason, needs a new shirt. Kevin starts laughing too, because even he can tell this is _not_ what either of them signed up for, and because neither of them apparently have normal fear reactions, they’re both wheezing and gasping for breath and wiping more tears away from their faces until Kevin starts making the time-out sign.

“Holy shit,” he gasps. “Okay. You wanna tell me what the hell just happened?”

Adam gets a last few giggles out before letting his head fall back down on the back seat. He’s so tired. Sharp teeth. The phantom sensation of being turned inside out. No, he doesn’t want to talk about that. “Shit, dude, it was a lot. Can we just go to Goodwill?”

“Okay. You gonna get in the front seat?”

“Yeah. Just give me a sec.”

Somehow he musters up the strength to sit up and re-enter the car from the front. He doesn’t bother buckling his seat belt, even though he can see Kevin giving him the stinkeye before starting the ignition. What’s the point if he can’t die?

“Goddamn, Michael,” Kevin sighs. “What did you drag me into?”

“You were the one who volunteered to drive me around,” he says, one of the last remaining chuckles bubbling up. “And… I guess it’s Adam. I don’t know why. It makes more sense now.”

Kevin nods as he turns them around, heading back into town. “Okay.” He reaches a hand out across the center console, and Adam takes it. They shake hands. “Nice to meet you, Adam.”


	5. almost heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> * suddenly, memories are flooding back!

He can’t tell whether Kevin is buying him a bunch of clothes because he feels sorry for him, or because this is actually the amount of clothes a human being needs on the road. In a daze, he follows the guy through the thrift store, ending up with a few pairs of jeans, a pair of shoes, some socks, some t-shirts, two long-sleeved shirts, and a windbreaker. He’s not sure how Kevin knows they’ll fit him, but he’s not really in the state of mind to question things.

“We are not getting underwear from a Goodwill,” he says, and pushes him into Runnings, wherein he gets two packs of boxer briefs slapped into his hands. Kevin also does a little shopping for auto repair stuff. The guy at checkout doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.

They toss everything into the back seat and then he looks back at the Runnings, the circular red logo slapped onto bare concrete. Old. Even older than he remembers.

And he suddenly finds that he remembers – everything.

The snap of Kevin’s fingers brings him back to the present. “Hey, you in there?” He’s already leaning on the driver’s side of the car, door open. “I was thinking we should skip town.”

“No,” he says firmly. “Can you, uh, swing by the lake? I can give you directions.”

Kevin gives him an assessing look and nods slowly. “Okay.”

* * *

There’s a parking lot out by Cottonwood Lake. Kevin leaves the car there and trails Adam as he makes his way out onto the tiny pier. It’s late fall and all of the leaves are gone, so he can see the flat farmland behind the screen of trees that line the far bank. The water is dark, but sunlight winks off the rippling surface as the wind pushes across.

“You remember this place?” Kevin asks, leaning against the wooden railing.

“That’s the thing,” Adam replies. “I had a couple of best friends in high school. We were in the Scouts together until they quit, and we’d come here to the beach late at night and have a couple of beers, light some fireworks or something. Responsibly.” He takes a deep breath and puts his elbows down on the railing next to Kevin, leaning out over the lake. “I remember all of it. We used to drop by the sandwich place near that café we went to. Next to the gas station. We thought we were cool because we didn’t eat the cafeteria food.”

Kevin raises his eyebrows. “Wow.”

“And they’re all thirty years old now. Isn’t that kind of…” He shrugs. “I don’t know, man. I just feel like I’m not supposed to be here.”

“I mean, that’s kind of true, right?” Kevin tucks his hands behind his head, scratching thoughtfully. “You’re not supposed to be nineteen and alive. You’re supposed to be dead. And after you die, Heaven or Hell claims your soul.”

He shrugs. “I don’t really remember an afterlife, if there was one.”

“Well, the fact that you’re not an incoherent mess probably means you were romping around in Heaven. Hell isn’t a nice place to be.”

“So was I kicked out? I thought that was a one-way ticket.”

Kevin sighs. “You know, that’s what it’s supposed to be like, but in the end, they’re just places. Sometimes they’re hard to get out of, and sometimes people don’t want to leave. But there are angels and demons flapping around on earth, so there are ways and means. I’m surprised we haven’t heard from anyone so far, actually.”

“Angels.” Adam closes his eyes. The headache hasn’t really gone away. It’s like someone is pressing their thumb against the back of his right eye. “I get demons, but why wouldn’t you want to talk to an angel?”

“Because they’re all power-hungry sons of bitches. Well, all the important ones, anyway.”

“I thought they were supposed to be, like, messengers of God or whatever. Bunch of blond dudes with wings.”

“Hate to burst your bubble, but almost every angel I’ve met has been a scheming asshole.”

“No exceptions?”

“Some exceptions. But even they are…” He groans and waves his hands. “Complicated. It’s all really complicated. Anyway, the fact that you’re alive probably isn’t _because_ of them, since I’m assuming you don’t have the big-ass handprint scar, but resurrections are rare enough that I thought someone would have come sniffing around by now.”

“Maybe I’m just not that interesting.”

“I dunno. People don’t just crawl out of the afterlife for no reason. And there’s the whole thing about…” He makes a vague fireworks gesture toward Adam.

He stares at Kevin. “What?”

“I told you when we met that your spiritual stuff seems kind of weird. Like, I don’t even notice most peoples’ souls, or internal energies, or qi, or whatever you want to call it. I think that might have something to do with it. Maybe someone’s trying to hide you.”

“Well, that’s a real comfort to hear. Thanks, Kev.”

Kevin shoots him a dirty look. “Okay, well, we don’t know who’s doing the hiding and who’s doing the seeking, or if this is even the case. It’s just a hypothetical.”

Michael pinches the bridge of his nose in a futile attempt to get the headache to buzz off. He just unlocked the motherlode of memories, and he has it all back, for which he is not actually all that grateful because it included _that_ memory. Why is his brain still pitching a fit?

“And another question,” Kevin continues. “But I guess this one doesn’t matter as much. Why’d you take Michael as your name?”

“It just felt right,” he says, then shakes his head, folding his arms. “I mean, it was the first one that popped into my head. Fun little Jeopardy fact for you, I was born on Michaelmas, so I spent most of my birthdays in church with my mom. Lutherans love that shit.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Nope. Guess I’ve just been bitter about that ever since.” Except he’d really like his mom back, and if that means giving up something as silly as birthdays for the rest of his life, he’d do it in a heartbeat.

“So you never got to celebrate your birthday?”

“Nah, I did, just not on the day. Can’t complain too much, either. Usually my dad would show up around that time, and it was the only time I ever got to see his deadbeat ass.”

Kevin stretches and yawns – thoughtfully, if it’s possible to yawn thoughtfully – and taps the side of his face with his fingers. “Hey, you remember his name? Maybe we can track him down. Let him know what’s up. I’m sure he’s been by and probably wasn’t too happy about what he found.”

Adam winces. “I don’t know if it would even mean anything. It’s not like we were close.”

“You don’t have any aunts or uncles who would be ecstatic to have you back?”

“What, the people who hung my mom out to dry once they found out she had a kid out of wedlock? Hell no.”

“Okay, then, what’s your plan? You’re not going to try to stay here, are you?”

He stares out at the lake, each glimmer of light making his head throb. Everything here is so familiar, well-worn, like the handlebars of an old bicycle. But he doesn’t belong here anymore, does he? It’s been ten years at least, and everyone must have moved on without him. They’ve smoothed over the missing Milligans, and life has gone on. He can’t just pick up where he left off. He died in the basement of his own house, and no one knows.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think I can.”

“All right. Well, you’re not staying with me, because I’m not gonna be responsible for dragging you into my career, and I work better solo, anyway. And I’d rather drop you off with someone you know than in the middle of Nowhere, Minnesota. So at least give me his name. Maybe he has a Facebook or something.”

He rubs the bridge of his nose again. “Uh, John. John Winchester. He was a car mechanic, travelled a lot. I don’t know where he’d be now.”

Kevin’s face freezes, then goes blank. “Winchester.”

Adam nods cautiously. “What’s with the attitude? Did you know him?”

“Maybe. I might know someone who knows him. And if I do, I’m going to kill him. The someone I know, I mean. If it’s the same John Winchester, he’s been dead for a long time.”

* * *

Kevin Tran makes a phone call leaning against the side of his dinky Camry, foot tapping out a tattoo of impatience on the parking lot asphalt. Michael-now-Adam is inside the car with some music playing for entertainment so he doesn’t go completely bonkers while Kevin is calling Tweedledum Winchester. He actually doesn’t have Tweedledee’s number, and he doesn’t feel like throwing out a line for the Cheshire Cas, so Sam it is.

It takes him a few rings for him to pick up, and by then, Kevin is ready to reach through the speaker and strangle him.

 _“Hello?”_ says Sam, warily. He sounds just like the last time Kevin saw him: oddly quiet for someone his size, and probably an appropriate amount of wary, considering that he’s calling him on his emergency line.

“Hey, Sam. It’s Kevin. And before you ask, no, this is not about a hunt.”

_“Kevin. Hey. It’s, uh, been a while. Five years, actually.”_

“Good thing you kept this number, then. So, funny story. I met this kid in some random Minnesota emergency room. He has no shoes on, and apparently he got intimately acquainted with a soccer mom’s front bumper, but he’s totally fine. Not a bruise on him. It’s just that he can’t remember a thing about who he is or where he’s from. Now, that sounds pretty weird to me.”

_“You said this wasn’t about a hunt.”_

“It’s not. So, the kid says his name is Michael.”

There’s a suspicious pause on Sam’s end. _“Michael what? Did he give you a last name?”_

“Nope. But after some detective work by yours truly, we recovered his actual name, and it’s not Michael. Want to guess what it was?”

There is dead silence on the other end and Kevin has to check his screen to make sure his call hasn’t dropped.

“Sam? You dead?”

_“No. No, I just – Ha-have you—”_

“Ran the gamut while he was passed out. Salt, holy water, silver, consecrated iron, and no signs of sucking out my life force so far. He’s just a little spaced out.”

_“Spaced out? Like, is he all there?”_

“Um, pretty much sane. Yep. Aside from recovering some horrific memories and drawing a total blank between 2009 and 2010, he’s just kinda shaken up. Anyway, when were you going to tell me there was a _third_ Winchester brother? Did you know about him?”

_“About Adam? Not until – hah. It’s a long story. Where are you right now?”_

“So he’s your brother?”

_“Half-brother.”_

“Whatever. You’re related.”

_“Yeah.”_

“Cool. You can tell me the long version later. You haven’t moved since the last time I saw you, right?”

_“Uh, no. Kevin, I—”_

“All right, tell Beth I said hi. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

_“Kev—”_

He hangs up. And takes a deep breath. And then he gets in the car, closes the door, and turns to Adam in order to blow his mind.

“So it turns out that I was right,” he says, buckling his seat belt and turning the key in the admission. He’s given up on telling Adam to buckle up for now – if he wants to go out the windshield, he’ll go out the windshield. “You have family.”

Adam stares at him, definitely not blown away in the least bit. “I _had_ family. My mom’s dead. Whoever I’m related to through my dad ain’t family.”

“Okay,” Kevin says, sighing. “They might not be family, but you have two biological half-brothers who are still alive. Sam and Dean Winchester. Your dad, John Winchester, was in my line of work. He died back in ’06 or ’07. And Sam and Dean… well, Sam’s retired, but Dean’s still in the family business.”

He seems to take a moment to digest this. “Are they older than me?”

Kevin does some mental math. “They would’ve been older than you back when you were alive, so yeah.”

“Do they know about me?”

He’s being very blasé about this. Kevin studies his face for a sign of, like, anything, before cautiously replying, “Yes. I’m guessing John told them about you before he died, or something. I told Sam to save the long version of the story for when we get there.”

“Where’s there?”

“Spring Mills, West Virginia. It’ll take about a day with no rest stops, but I’m used to long drives, so it’ll be fast for you.”

He makes a time-out gesture. “Okay. You’re going to drop me with some randos in West Virginia, the kids of some guy who ditched my mom like the rest of her family, and somehow we’re gonna be best buds? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Kevin shrugs. “Well, from what I gather, they didn’t like your dad much, either. And you don’t have much of a choice.”

Adam squints. “I’m noticing that you’re not saying I might like them.”

“I worked with him for a while, and we had some personal issues. Look, I’m not saying the guy’s a saint, but it’s either that, or I drop you off on the side of the road, or you get killed on a hunt.”

“Again,” he says.

Kevin stares at him for a moment before realizing his faux pas. “Uh, yeah. Again. Sorry.”

“Yeah. I don’t feel like getting eaten again,” and here he manages to laugh unconvincingly, “so my other two options are both kicking it with monster hunters for a living. Great.” He slumps back in his seat, pinching at the bridge of his nose. That’s preceded a couple of things, so Kevin decides to take his foot off the metaphorical pedal.

“You good to go, dude?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t move his fingers.

“Roll the window down if you need air. I’m gonna top up at the gas station, and then we’ll be driving for about twenty hours.”

“Hey, Kevin?”

He throws the car in reverse and cranes his head over his right shoulder. “What?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four. Why, are you planning on stealing my identity?”

“Just curious.”

Kevin shrugs. “Well, if we add ten years to your age, you’re technically five or six years older than me.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

* * *

He heads into the men’s room at the gas station and does his duty, then washes his hands and wipes them on his jacket and when he glances up he sees his face in the mirror. He needs a shave. Interesting. He pokes at the bags under his eyes, and runs his fingers through his hair, which is getting a little longer.

The average hunter is not from a heavily urbanized area. Monsters tend to be much more straightforward when there are trees and dark places to hide in and fewer people to see them. Kevin, because of Certain Events, is not an average hunter. He’s a bit more book-smart, less of a drinker, knows a thing or two from the tablets that the average hunter doesn’t. He suspects that this is why he’s lasted so long despite being smaller and less experienced than most. Well, he’s nothing to mess with now, but his sense isn’t as sharp, his decisions come a split second slower. Also, he drinks way too much coffee.

Other hunters sometimes can’t pin him as a hunter because of the way he dresses, which he finds hilarious. A clean-shaven (usually) twenty-something with close-cropped hair, kinda short, dressed like a college student? Not your normal fare. And Asians are pretty rare in the business, too. It does get him some flack, though, and he likes keeping to himself.

Which is a big part of why there is a little voice in the back of his head saying hey Kevin, you’re ferrying this kid across the US because he’s Sam Winchester’s baby half-brother, since when did you start doing things because of the Winchesters, huh? Adam is an amnesiac. Probably repressed a lot of traumatic memories. And from the peek he took at the records back in Windom, they probably do, in fact, involve dying horribly, being eaten by ghouls. Gathering from the screaming in the car, one of them probably looked like his mom. Not a happy memory to go out on. It’s really, really, really not his problem, he doesn’t do the Winchesters favors, he doesn’t take on charity cases like this, but there’s this hunch – Sam knows Adam, somehow, and Adam doesn’t remember Sam. The asymmetry of their relationship sounds, well, like a typical Winchester thing. Be associated with them, get heaven and hell and everything in between baying for your blood, and no one to help.

He rubs at the dark shadows under his eyes in an attempt to restore some circulation, then leaves the rest stop with two large coffees and a bunch of granola bars for the road. The late autumn air is freezing on his damp face and wakes him up like a slap to both cheeks. The poor dinged-up Camry is sitting in the parking space where he left it, with lots of concealed weapons and one kid with a wiped brain. Wild to admit that Adam is chronologically older than him, and should be around, oh, thirty by now. He still looks and acts like a teenager, though, for all the world.

Through the passenger-side window he notes that Adam’s got a thousand-yard stare on, slowly clenching and unclenching the fingers of his right hand. He must be miles away in his head – he wonders if that’s an anxiety thing. He raps on the glass to wake him up a bit. The full-body flinch that ensues kind of makes him feel bad, so he tries a placating smile. Adam just gives him a slightly put-off face and pulls the seat belt over his lap. Score one for Kevin.

He walks around to the other side of the car, gets in the driver’s seat, and pulls away, and they leave Windom behind.

* * *

It’s only about half an hour in by the time he starts drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He’s not averse to some quiet, but it really, honestly feels like he’s sitting next to a trauma time bomb. It’s unfair, but the kid relived getting eaten alive, and if he has a violent side, Kevin reaaaally doesn’t want to discover that while going a very illegal eighty-five on the interstate. But people cope with life changes in different ways, and stuff like that, so he just keeps quiet and hums along to a waltz.

Finally, finally, finally, when they’re somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin, Adam asks him a question. It startles him out of his mindless hum-along to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

“Sorry?”

“Sam Winchester. What’s he like?”

“Oh. Sam. Uh, he’s – interesting.”

Adam gives him the _Really? You’re really doing this?_ face and folds his arms. Kevin sucks a breath through his teeth.

“Where to start. Um, well, as I said, he’s a hunter. He’s married, last I heard, one kid. He should be about – thirty-nine by now. He lives in West Virginia, where we are currently headed… like, what do you want to know?”

Adam shrugs, looks away. “Dunno. I’m gonna be living with the guy. Is he a hardass?”

“Nah.” Kevin tries to give him a reassuring smile. “Sam’s pretty, uh, sympathetic.” One way of putting it.

“You’re hiding something.” Adam presents this as a statement, not an accusation. Kevin can feel the guy’s unblinking stare drilling twin holes in his face.

“We have some history. It’s not gonna affect you. Just… Sam’s been through a lot of stuff. Like, more than the average hunter goes through, and trust me, we go through a lot. It kinda messed him up. He’s not a violent guy off the job, but he was talking like he knew you, so don’t be surprised if there are some unpleasant memories floating around on his end. I don’t know if he has many good memories about anything anymore.”

“You said you worked together. Were you friends?”

Kevin actually doesn’t know how to answer that, so he hems and haws for a few moments.

“Not really. Comrades, maybe.”

“Makes it sound like you were fighting a war.”

“Well, we did kind of did. It’s a pretty well-kept secret.”

Adam nods, and Kevin thinks he might drift off again, but the thousand-yard stare is gone and he seems to be processing all of this new information.

“So,” he says. “What were you fighting? I’m assuming it’s some kind of spooky monster thing, given the whole…”

“Leviathans,” Kevin says. “People-eaters from another world, basically. Kind of like ghouls, but more of an all-at-once type of deal.” Oh, this was a bad topic to get into. “They could take anyone’s shape, and they decided to climb the corporate ladder to start turning the States and Canada into a farm.”

“A farm? Like for people? Wow. Assholes.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Adam laughs. It’s a sharp, brash sound, but Kevin finds himself grinning, too.

“So team humanity won?”

“Hell yes.”

“How many Leviathans were there?”

“Dunno. Hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“And freedom fighters?”

“About… six, I think.”

Adam’s eyebrows rapidly approach his hairline. “How’d you do it?”

“Some arcane ritual. Put some blood on a bone and stabbed their boss in the neck. He exploded, and it was over just like that.”

“Really.”

“Yup.”

“You and Sam and… other people.”

“Exactly.”

Adam clearly doesn’t believe him, but shrugs and doesn’t push any further. Kevin appreciates that. “How long have you two known each other?”

“Around nine years. I haven’t spoken to him in a couple, though. I’ve been going from hunt to hunt for the past few years.”

He frowns. “Huh. So you’re not exactly on good terms.”

Kevin shrugs. He doesn’t want to elaborate about the Winchester curse or anything like that. “We just fell out of contact.” That’s the easiest way to explain how Sam Winchester works. “It was a bad time for everyone and we just kind of went our separate ways. But now there’s you, so I guess I’ll be paying him a visit.”

“So he’s not going to kill us or anything.”

“What? No. Ah-hah. That – yeah, no, he doesn’t usually go for that kind of thing.”

“Good, because if you dropped me off at a serial killer’s place, I would haunt your ass.”

Kevin winces. “You probably don’t want that.”

“To get murdered again? Nah.” There’s a weird edge to his voice that Kevin doesn’t know how to respond to.

“We don’t have to keep talking about this if it’s making you… you know. With the whole head thing.”

Adam shakes his head. “Man, I thought recovering from amnesia would be cool, but remembering shit actually sucks.” His head thunks against the window and he stares angrily at the passing scenery.

Kevin looks over at him. “What are you remembering?”

He cracks his neck. “Like. Stuff from school. My mom. John. And there’s this whole other – I thought I remembered everything, but I think there’s more. I’m still getting the headaches, and it feels like… something wants to come out.”

“Memories? They could be from your time in the afterlife before you came back here.”

“No idea. But, I mean, if I was in – either, or something, why _would_ I come back? Isn’t there supposed to be some, like, grand moral judgement? Saint Peter ushers you through the Pearlies or boots you down to the lake of fire, and that’s final, right? So. Why.”

“I dunno. Usually people have to agree to leave the afterlife, and usually resurrection involves the direct intervention of some divine agency.”

 _“Divine agency?_ Like, God? Or the Devil?”

Kevin winces. “Or angels. Something like that. There has to be a plan. Sam knows more about it than I do.”

Adam nods like he’s finally gotten a useful piece of information out of you. “Okay, so he’s not just another hunter.”

“No, he was a hunter. He was also buddies with Castiel.”

“And who’s that?”

He clicks his tongue. Adam’s decided to go for the crash course. “Castiel is an angel.”

“An angel. With like, wings and everything?”

“No wings. At least, not visible wings. Angels take human vessels when they leave Heaven.”

The kid gets that weird look on his face again and falls silent. Kevin checks the clock. It’s 4:32 and they’ve only been on the road for two and a half hours. They’ll be passing through Illinois and Indiana. Now there’s nothing but hilly, dull expanses of dead grass and bare trees on either side of the road, almost indistinguishable in the darkness. He’s never lived in Illinois and probably only been on one hunt in the state, but he tends to keep to the Northeast, anyway.

“Tell me something you remember,” he says, determined to keep Adam from clamming up again, because even if their conversation can only get freaky and weird, this is a twenty-hour drive and he is certainly not going to think to himself the whole way there if he doesn’t need to. Adam blinks at him, confused for a moment, then leans back in his seat and sighs

“What kind of thing?”

“Anything. Like, what’s the last memory you got back?”

“Uh.” Adam doesn’t look at him, scratches his head. “My freshman year in college. I was standing in line at the dining hall, and I was thinking about – like, mundane stuff. Grades. Plans. What I was going to do that week. I was dating Daisy at the time and we were supposed to meet up tomorrow afternoon to go someplace.” He shrugs. “Not spectacular.”

“Daisy?”

Adam does a kind of chuckle. “Daisy Murphy.”

“Is that her real name?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I think I just developed, like, diabetes. Jeez.”

“Oh, and you were doing better?”

He dreams about Channing sometimes. Sometimes they’re good dreams. Mostly, he dreams about her dying.

“No,” he says. “Sounds like you liked her, though.”

They end up passing at least seven of the twentyish hours talking about Adam’s memories. Kevin is continually amazed at how, well, _normal_ Adam turned out to be, considering he was related to the Winchesters. But he guesses being eaten alive by a ghoul kind of evens things out on the Winchester curse deal.

There are a lot of high school memories, fewer of when he was younger. Kate seems like she was a good mother, really supportive, a bit of a wild child at times. His memories of John are pretty spotty, not the least because he’d only seen him three or four times. There are memories of biology labs, joyrides, hikes, sitting at home watching television, cooking disasters that he’d somehow handled despite being eleven and entrusted with a stove. Noodles catching fire, exploding potatoes. Water boiling over. Mac and cheese and fruit yogurt, two great tastes that tasted garbage together. And then the times that he didn’t have to cook: dinner with Kate, a hot dog with John, dinner at Richard’s, sitting on the quad sharing a sandwich with his girlfriend.

Besides the whole absent dad thing, which Adam actually doesn’t seem to care too much about, his life was pretty idyllic up until he became monster mash. Kevin doesn’t find it particularly sad. That’s how a lot of victims are. That’s how a lot of hunters are.

He was six when his mother first took him to his grandmother’s grave. She had been cremated and the ashes had been placed in a niche, so there was no headstone. TRAN BICH-HANG in white letters, and a year of birth and a year of death, and nothing more than a small pot of sand with broken sticks sitting in front of it.

His mom, in a black business suit, taught him how to pay respects to his grandmother at her grave. He visited his father’s grave for the first time when he was twelve, and she was proud of him for knowing just what to do. He still has her driver’s license in his wallet.

Adam’s never going to get that, but at least he has family, whether he wants it or not. And despite all the bad blood between him and the Winchesters, he’d feel like shit if he left a teenager out to dry when there was someone out there who could have taken care of him and cared about him. Plus, while he might not trust Sam to not fuck everything up, his wife isn’t dead yet, so they must have figured something out.

He wishes they could have figured it out a long time ago.

* * *

Adam falls asleep in Ohio and wakes up in a fancy room with lush oil paintings in gilt frames and beautiful woodwork furniture. A crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, over the head of a businessman with a friendly round face, deep-set eyes, and a dusting of gray-white hair on his bald head. He’s eating a hamburger, which is weird, because in a room as fancy as this, he’d expect to be eating filet mignon and caviar, or whatever rich people eat in rich people restaurants.

But he doesn’t have enough time to figure out how he got the hamburger, or why he’s eating a hamburger, or where he is, or who that businessman with the dead eyes and too-quick smile is, before his stomach explodes and the food finds its way back up his esophagus, but it’s dark red, spilling from his mouth, dripping onto the table. The supernova in his gut is pushing up blood. Enough of his brain stays functional to point out, from a distance, that this isn’t how food works.

The man smiles and stands up.

And Adam wakes up with a start, so fast that Kevin curses and swerves a bit before straightening out the steering wheel.

“Dude!”

“Sorry.”

“You okay?”

He rubs his eyes. “You keep asking me that.”

“Memory?”

A pause.

“I don’t know. Maybe. It didn’t seem – real. I think it was just a nightmare.”

Kevin takes a sip of his gas station coffee. “You wanna tell me what it was?”

He shakes his head. Mostly because he doesn’t want Kevin to confirm that he’s died multiple times from supernatural causes. “Maybe later.”

There’s a weird pause, because yeah, how do you react to that?

“Okay,” Kevin says simply, and Adam folds his arms up again, trying to go back to sleep.

To be honest, he wouldn’t be mad if he never slept again.

* * *

They get to West Virginia by climbing up into the Appalachians. It’s well into the morning by the time Adam wakes up again, and Kevin has another two empty cups of coffee nestled in the center console. He’s paying a lot of attention to navigating the narrow, winding roads and avoiding collisions with trucks.

“Morning,” he croaks, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and stretching his arms and legs as far as the car will let him.

“Sleep well?” Kevin doesn’t take his eyes off of the road.

“Better than usual, actually. How’s driving been? Seen any Blair Witches?”

“That would have made it interesting,” he grumbles. “We’re almost there. I’ll fill the tank again at the next turn-off, and then it should only be, like, an hour or so.”

The look on Kevin’s face betrays how actually okay he is with visiting these guys. The Winchesters. His expression is usually neutral and unassuming, but it’s going downright stony, mouth a straight line and jaw set. He’s pretty sure it’s more about their soon-to-be-hosts than crankiness from the drive and the crap coffee.

Yeah, Kevin lied. It’s not just that they don’t get along because of personality issues – Kevin and Sam have some pretty serious issues with each other. It doesn’t help the anxiety bubbling in Adam’s gut. He’s not sure what’s going to happen, but it might not end up being real pretty.

Kevin says that Spring Mill is located in the east, but everything blends together in trees and mountains and small towns, one after the other, dressed in orange and yellow and brown. It’s miles and miles of this, and the road to Spring Mill hugs the side of a mountain covered in trees. His ears start popping every so often. Kevin’s probably going to break his jaw if he clenches it any tighter.

“So I take it you don’t like Sam all that much,” he says, because Kevin is doing a really poor job of hiding it and he doesn’t want him to accidentally drive them off a cliff in a fit of explosive rage.

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” Kevin says after a moment of consideration. “It’s just that our history is a bit… it’s complicated.”

“Like, Facebook ‘it’s complicated’?”

Kevin throws him a withering look. “Wow. You really are from 2009. And, uh, no. More like there are a lot of deaths in our history. That kind of complicated.”

Michael shrugs. “You didn’t tell me anything, so I guessed.”

“He’s like fifteen years older than me, and anyway, I wouldn’t date anyone who tried to kill my mom. I have _some_ standards.”

“He _what?”_

“Never mind,” Kevin says testily, and Michael feels as if he’s inadvertently pushed them closer to the death-by-cliff scenario. And whoever Sam is, Kevin is not really painting an endearing picture of him. “The point is, he’s got connections, so he might be able to help you with your head problem.”

Adam tries to trace the flimsy logic. “So I’ll be safer… with the guy… who tried to kill your mom.”

“I told you, it was complicated. He had reasons, and it didn’t work, anyway. It won’t affect you. Especially because you’re family to him. Whatever happened between me and him is just personal.”

He nods and raises his eyebrows to himself. “He sounds like a swell guy. No issues.”

“He has at least as many issues as you probably do. No offense.”

“Some goddamn taken, Kev.”

Kevin snorts and feels around the console for his coffee. “Anyway, I’ll probably stick around for a couple of days to catch up. If you hate the guy after that, we’ll find somewhere else to drop you. Cas can probably swing some memory wipes, or whatever.”

“Cas is Castiel? The angel?”

“Right.”

He frowns. “They can do shit like that? Wiping memories? And you said they’re usually involved in resurrections, right?”

Kevin almost freezes at the wheel, but his survival instincts thankfully kick in just in time to prevent them from certain death. “You’re right, actually. Shit. I thought they might have had something to do with this, but since none of them showed up… Maybe I was just being optimistic. We might have to have Cas put in a call.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’ll have to contact someone who still belongs in the Heavenly Host and might know what’s going on,” Kevin explains. “Heaven is just a constant chess game with a thousand players nowadays.”

“Isn’t he an angel? Why would he need to contact someone?”

“Well, he’s a fallen angel. Not like, you know, Satan, but he’s kind of been excommunicated from Heaven, and he also basically married into the Winchester family. It’s very _Lord of the Rings.”_

“I never saw those movies.”

“The books are better,” Kevin says snidely. “But for real, dude, there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t know how to explain on my own. And I’m sure Sam is holding onto some crucial stuff as well. You’re missing a year, we don’t know how you got back, and we don’t know who brought you back or why, so I’d say we still have a lot of mystery to solve.”

Adam cracks the window for some air and folds his arms. The name _Sam Winchester_ doesn’t ring any bells, and he’s not sure he’s going to like what they find when they solve this mystery. But it’s like looking at a rotting corpse and being overcome by morbid curiosity, unable to look away in horrified fascination, except the body is his own.

He’s suddenly sure that if he doesn’t find out why the hell he’s here, he’ll regret it for however long he ends up living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope y'all are staying safe during these trying times! wash hands, do a good social isolation practice, #flattenthecurve etc.


	6. the first reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam sees an old-new face.

Spring Mill is a very small town. The population, Adam estimates, is probably just under two thousand. The town itself is nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia (or so Kevin tells him) and there’s a river flowing somewhere nearby. The buildings are pretty small-town, some of them more upkept than others but all of them worn. Once they pull off the main street, the houses are very humble affairs, verging on run-down. There aren’t very many people here.

The Winchester household is nondescript - two floors and a big tree with a tire swing in the front yard. There’s a very carefully-cultivated herb garden and a few window boxes, although the window boxes are empty at this time of year, and they have one of those raised decks.

Kevin parks at the curb, glancing at him before unbuckling his seatbelt and slipping out of the car. Adam fumbles with the buckle, suddenly on edge, and follows Kevin up the driveway, feeling rather unwieldy after so long on the road. Kevin’s waiting for him at the steps going up to the porch, and makes a valiant attempt at a reassuring smile. His boots make hollow thumps on the stair boards.

He knocks, then waits, then knocks again. Michael hears footsteps from inside and someone fumbles at the knob. The door opens.

“Hey, Kevin,” comes the tired voice.

“Hey yourself,” says Kevin.

Oh. He knows that face.

“Adam. Hi.” Sam tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite make it all the way across his face. “It’s b--”

* * *

Michael doesn’t know what happens between standing on Sam’s porch and waking up on what he assumes is the guest bed. All he knows is that his head feels like it’s been freshly stapled back together, and Sam and Kevin are standing at the foot of the bed arguing in hushed tones. And he still has his shoes on, which is a big no-no.

But what they’re saying makes him keep his eyes closed.

_ “--I mean, like, how bad was it? How much time did you spend down there?” _

_ “It was just a year, but it felt like a century. And I don’t even remember all of it because Cas, again, wiped my slate. I almost died. I was hallucinating all kinds of morbid shit. You really think we know anyone who can do anything to fix this? How long has it been for him? Ten, eleven years, Earthside? There shouldn’t have been anything left of him to get out of the Cage in the first place, even if Michael intervened. If he remembers me at all, I’ll be shocked.” _

_ “Shit.” _

_ “Yeah.” _

Sam’s tone isn’t condescending, but it is  _ sad,  _ and that scares the shit out of him. Kevin’s been touting this guy as a fix and it turns out he might end up going crazy and dying.

He can hear Kevin shuffling his feet.

_ “Are you still gonna let him stay here?” _

_ “What? Yes! He’s my responsibility, Kevin. Mine and Dean’s. It was our fault he ended up in Hell in the first place, anyway.” _

_ “You never told me  _ that  _ story.” _

There’s a long, almost unbearable pause.

_ “It was during the Apocalypse.” _

The apocalypse. Okay.

_ “And Dean was Michael’s vessel. I know. You told me you fell into the Cage with Michael and Lucifer, but Dean--” _

_ “--was left here. Yeah. Because Michael decided that Adam was an adequate bloodline substitute.” _

_ “Because of John. Holy shit.” _

_ “So when I fell, I took Michael with me, but still in Adam’s body. What? Okay, I know it’s confusing. If you want the details, you’re better off asking Castiel when he gets here.” _

His heart is about to punch its way out of his chest. Michael.  _ The  _ Michael. Michaelmas Michael.  _ Saint Michael the Archangel defend us in battle. _ That Michael. That’s who they’re talking about.

That’s the name he took. The name he still reaches for on reflex. Him. He’s Michael, or he was.

There’s another long pause. He could probably go back to sleep without them noticing that he’d woken up at all, but he needs answers  _ now.  _ So he sits up and asks, groggily. “What happened?”

That gets both of them to jump and look over at him.

Sam is - tall. Not very much taller than himself, but definitely almost seven or eight inches on Kevin. Wide build. Brown hair pulled back, a few strands of gray. Small nose, deep-set hazel eyes, faint lines around the mouth and across the forehead. He doesn’t know how, exactly, to interpret his expression, but if he had to take a guess, he’d say that Sam is trying very hard to hide fear.

He and Sam look nothing alike.

But there’s something about Sam’s face that is oh-so-familiar.

“You straight up passed out, dude,” Kevin says cautiously. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” he replies honestly, because he actually doesn’t know. “You were sayin’ something about angels. Michael and Lucifer.”

“You don’t remember?” Sam steps closer, hands up almost like he’s trying to calm a pissed-off cat. “Any of it?”

Adam doesn’t really appreciate this approach. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

There is yet another lengthy silence where Sam and Kevin apparently shoot telepathic thought beams at each other instead of talking with words like normal human beings. Adam sits up slowly, taking off his shoes and folding one leg up on the bed. Kevin finally throws his hands up in a gesture of exasperated surrender, and Sam turns back to him.

“So I’m assuming you heard a lot of what we said,” Sam says.

“Yup.” Adam crosses his arms. “Something about vessels.”

The guy seems to want to say something, but can’t spit it well out. “You’re sure you don’t remember  _ anything?  _ Nothing weird, nothing out of place? Nothing that feels… like it doesn’t fit in?”

He wants to say  _ no  _ out of spite because Sam has this very sincere, dorky attitude about him, but then he remembers that he’s here to get help and it looks like Sam is predisposed to helping people, which is a good thing.

So he says, “Yeah. Kind of.” And then he balks.

Sam waits him out for a beat, then raises his eyebrows and says, “Like what?”

He shakes his head. “Like, uh… I had this dream that I was sitting in some fancy restaurant eating a burger, and this kinda… bald guy wearing a suit was sitting across from me. Watching me eat. And I guess he did something to the food, because…”

“Because?”

Michael sighs. Jesus, this is ridiculous. “Because I started pukin’ blood. That’s it. What’s my prognosis, doc?”

Kevin and Sam look at each other again. Kevin shrugs. Sam shrugs.

Sam says, “That’s the room where you met Michael.”

He raises his eyebrows in spite of himself. “Michael’s some dumpy middle-aged dude in a crappy suit?”

“No, Zachariah’s vessel was ‘some dumpy middle-aged dude in a crappy suit.’ Michael can only take vessels from John Winchester’s bloodline. That was supposed to be Dean.”

“So why wasn’t it Dean?”

His alleged half-brother takes a deep breath and looks at him, then looks at Kevin, then tries that half-smile again. “You two feel up for a drink? I know it’s only one-thirty, and you just woke up, but--”

Kevin’s already halfway out the door. “Yes, please. Oh my god.”

The house is pretty nondescript inside, too. Worn beige carpet and faded linoleum, off-white walls and dusty floral-print curtains. A few paintings. Sam shows them to the living room, where there is a wide-screen television, a blue couch, and a brown corduroy armchair. There are toys scattered over the carpet - little green army men and Legos and a plush shark. Sam dips into the kitchen, then places three beers on the coffee table and sags into the armchair.

“Right,” he says uncomfortably. “Yeah. So. Adam.”

God, this man is so awkward. “Yep.”

“Kevin says you remember… everything up to - the ghoul incident.”

“Up to and including,” he replies, picking up the beer. He can’t help getting a little testy. Sam knows something and he’s dancing around it because it makes him uncomfortable, and he just wants to know what it is. “Can we cut to the chase?”

Kevin pops the cap off of his beer while Sam tries to formulate an answer.

“Right,” Sam says again. “Um. Right. Do you remember anything about Hell?”

Adam shrugs. “No.”

“Nothing at all?”

“From what you were saying earlier, it seems like if I remember anything about Hell, it’ll fry my brain. So, no, not really.”

“Huh. Okay.” Sam takes a deep breath and gestures incoherently with his beer. “Do you remember anything about Michael.”

“Just the name. I mean, I thought my name  _ was  _ Michael for a while there.” It’s still the one that comes easiest, and it feels more comfortable, but he guesses that’s something he should keep to himself for now.

“Michael was an archangel. Well, I guess he still is. But… anyway, he had these - big plans about saving humanity by throwing down with his brother Lucifer, which would kickstart the Apocalypse. And in order to do any of that, they had to possess humans of compatible bloodlines, which happened to be ours. A combination of the Campbells, on my mom’s side, and the Winchesters, on my - our - dad’s side. So, technically, there should have been one archangel for me, and one for Dean.”

“So let me guess - my ass got saddled with Michael and one of you two was literally possessed by the Devil.” His joke immediately falls flat. Sam gives him a half-cringing smile.

“Bingo. Dean refused to let Michael possess him and fry half the world, basically, so you were next in line. During the big throwdown, we opened up a portal to Hell, and I managed to get control from Lucifer to drag both of the archangels down with me.”

“Which included me,” he fills in. Turns out that this isn’t a story he likes. “So you and me, we were both in Hell?”

“Locked in the Cage, which is Lucifer’s personal god-given prison. Really not a nice place.”

Kevin looks pensive.

Adam shakes his head. “Okay, rewind. I don’t remember any of this. How do I get from - being dead, to meeting Michael? Me and Kevin figure there’s a year missing from the books, between 2009 and 2010.”

“Not quite. You died sometime in early March of 2009, and you got resurrected about the same time the next year. A month and a half after that, we met up at Stull Cemetery, and…”

“Everything went to Hell. Yeah. Okay, well, even if it wasn’t a full year, I still don’t remember any angels besides Zachary.”

“Zachariah.”

“Whatever. And you’re saying I was possessed by Michael?”

“Like you said, you were calling yourself Michael before you figured out what your real name was. You were stuck down there with him for a long time.”

“Yeah. I guess ten years is a long time to be possessed.”

“Ten years Earthside,” Sam corrects, although Adam can sense some suspicious reluctance on his side.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam clears his throat. “It means that time works differently in Hell. When, uh - when Dean was there, he felt like he’d been there for, what, forty years? But it was only a month. The Cage… felt different.”

“You said it felt like a century,” Adam echoes. “How long was it? For you? A year?”

“Yeah.”

“And you got resurrected, too.”

“Yes,” he sighs. “And no. Castiel got my body up here, but Dean had to ask a favor from Death to put my soul back into it.”

“From Death? Death is a dude?”

“He’s one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but he looks like a dude, yes.”

“Okay.” Adam wipes his hands over his face. “So I was down there for ten Earth years. In Cage time, that’s like… a thousand years, right?”

Sam shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Then shouldn’t it be the other way around? I mean, I shouldn’t remember anything about being a human. It should all be memories of Hell. But you remember everything - about life before Hell, and life in Hell. What’s different for me?”

“I… don’t actually know.”

Adam leans back in his seat, frustrated. Is there anything this guy knows for sure? “Oh. Okay. That’s - thank you, Kevin, this was very helpful.”

“This is so not my fault, dude.”

Sam leans forward and gives him that sickeningly sincere look again. “Adam, look. I get it. Things are kind of crazy right now, and you don’t know me from a hole in the wall, but I can give you  _ some  _ answers. Cas will be able to tell you more. And if nothing else, you’re safe with us.”

That sounds tempting. Despite how much he’s been scoffing at his earnest schtick, it’s really tempting to trust Sam. He seems, like, actually  _ concerned  _ about him, and his face is still so familiar. He knows it’s just the memory of John projecting itself onto Sam, and he was never that fond of John, but… there’s nothing else out there.  _ Mom’s dead. _

He fights back the sudden lump in his throat and says, “How do I know?”

Sam’s brow furrows. “Know what?”

“That I’m safe. Because given what you just told me about our family trip to Hell, it doesn’t seem like you have a good track record with the whole witness protection gig.”

“He has a point,” Kevin says. Sam shoots him a long-suffering look.

“I won’t stop you from leaving, but your chances out there alone are slim to none. If someone’s after you, this house is covered wall-to-wall in wards, so I’d say it’s your best shot. And you’ll have a room to yourself.”

“Sweet deal.”

“You got any better ideas, I’d love to hear ’em,” Sam says wearily. “Whether you feel the same way or not, to me, you’re family. I fucked up protecting you in the past, I’m not denying that. But if there is anything I can do, and I mean anything, I’ll do it. You don’t--” He struggles for a moment. “You don’t deserve anything less.”

That gets him. He hates to admit it, but it’s convincing. If Kevin really is out there fighting vampires and other kooky shit all the time, he won’t be safe on the road. And if someone is trying to track him down, he’d rather not have that come to a head around someone like Scott or Martha.

He slumps back against the couch. “Yeah. Okay.”

Sam takes that in for a second, then nods. “Cool. Um. If you have any more questions--”

They’re saved by the sound of a car pulling into a driveway. Kevin shoots out of his seat to escape the most awkward reunion in history. There’s noise outside, a woman’s voice and a child’s voice. The door opens and the voices grow louder as they come down the hallway. Sam puts his beer back down on the table and stands up, running a hand through his hair.

“Wow, Kevin, I haven’t seen you since the wedding! What have you been up to, ya rascal?”

“Same old, nothing special. I was in the area with a friend of Sam’s, and I thought we’d drop by for a bit to pay you and Allison a visit.”

“You’re staying for dinner. Aht-aht, don’t argue with me. Who’s the friend?”

That’s his cue.

“That’d be me.” He stands up and walks into the hallway, offering his hand with a smile. The woman, whoever she is -  _ Sam’s wife,  _ he realizes, and feels dumb about it. “I’m Adam.”

“Nice to meet you, Adam. I’m Beth.” Beth shakes his hand firmly. She’s a little less lined in the face than Sam, with keen brown eyes and curly black hair. “And this--” she takes her hand back and picks up the little girl who has been pattering around the room under her father’s supervision - “is Allison. Say hi, Allison.”

“Hi,” Allison chirps, not looking at him.

“Hey.”

Beth smiles. “I’m guessing you know Sam through Kevin? I’ve never heard him mention an Adam.”

Sam swoops in like an enormous gangly stork, taking his daughter in his arms and kissing Beth on the cheek. He has also saved Adam from explaining how a thirty-nine-year-old man has a brother twenty years younger than him. Their dad would be, what, seventy? Eighty? If he wasn’t dead, that is.

“He might be staying with us for a bit. Is that okay with you?”

She throws him a sidelong glance. “Sure thing. I’m not getting serial killer vibes yet. You all settled in, Adam? Need any help?”

“Uh, no thank you, ma’am,” he says, watching Sam set Allison on the floor. She immediately dashes over to the pile of Legos.

Adam gets a taste of Sam and Kevin’s telepathic connection as both of them share a  _ boy, this explanation is gonna be fun  _ smile. Kevin says something inaudible in the kitchen, and Beth says, “What?” and leaves her husband and half-brother-in-law squirming in the living room.

* * *

Somehow, he survives to dinner. Sam is still handling him like he’s liable to snap at any minute, which does nothing to ease his concerns about the fact that his brain might melt if he remembers anything else. Beth tosses his conversational softballs, and the act of thinking about what he can’t say occupies him enough to distract him from the Sam in the room.

The dining room is a table in the kitchen. Sam sets the table while Beth takes a casserole out of the oven. 

Allison is the one to engage him in conversation this time. She’s a frighteningly smart kid for being all of four years old.

“How old are you?” she asks, patting her hands dry on a towel after washing her hands. He follows suit, pushing on the pout of the soap dispenser and trying to think of ways not to lie to her.

“How old do you think I am?”

“A billion,” Allison says confidently, with a sly smile.

“Nah, not a billion. Your dad isn’t a billion years old, is he?”

Sam snorts. “No, I am not.”

Allison lowers her estimate accordingly. “Seventy-five.”

“Nope, guess again.”

“No, you guess how old  _ I  _ am now.”

He pretends to think. “Four.”

“Four and a half! Hah!”

“Aw, man, I was so close.”

Kevin snickers from the other end of the table, where he’s setting out glasses.

The sun has already set by the time they’re all seated. Beth says a short grace - strange, because Adam didn’t take either of them to be the religious type - and then they eat. Sam makes a point of serving everyone. There’s a loaf of bread and a bowl of salad that makes its way around the table to everyone except Allison, who has her portions meted out by her parents because she’s too short to reach anything.

“So, Kevin, what have you been up to these past five years?” Beth asks, hollowing out the end piece of the loaf. “And don’t give me the  _ same old  _ act again, I want details.”

“Hunting is hunting,” Kevin says. “It’s a hard life to get out of, I’ll say that. Sam’s a lucky guy.”

Sam laughs shortly. “Yeah, well. I didn’t really get out, just kind of dropped it.”

“Spring Mill isn’t a very active site, anyway,” Beth adds. “Which is why we chose it.”

“Were you a hunter, too?” Michael feels like this might have been a presumptuous question to ask. Sam looks up from his food and over at Beth, who makes a weird grimacing face.

“No, but my father’s a priest. We saw our fair share of strange things, we knew our fair share of hunters. Have you been hunting, or is Kevin just dragging you around to see the sights?”

Kevin waves his forkful of casserole. “I take offense to that.”

He decides to start dropping the bomb. “He picked me up basically off the side of the road, actually. I didn’t, uh, remember anything much about myself until a few days ago. Like, bits and pieces, but I can only recall most of my life before I turned nineteen.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And when was that? You don’t look a day over seventeen. No offense.”

“It was twelve years ago. Apparently.”

The table is dead silent. Sam looks extremely uncomfortable, and both of Beth’s eyebrows have shot up to meet her widow’s peak. Kevin coughs and shoves food into his mouth so he doesn’t have to be burdened with the task of explaining anything, the weaselly bastard. Allison does the same, but she’s a toddler, so it’s not like she cares about the conversation.

“So,” Beth says slowly. “Sam, you would have been - twenty-six, at the time? Twenty-seven? How did you two know each other?”

Adam is highly amused and extremely  _ be _ mused by the way she brushes over the fact that he is missing over a decade.

“Yeah.” Sam has a sheepish look on his face. “Um… Adam’s my half-brother, Beth.”

Her brow furrows. “I thought Dean was your only…  _ what?” _

“It’s a long story.”

“A story which you’ve had plenty of time to tell.” She puts her fork down on the table.

“I know. And I’m sorry. But it’s… it’s been a long time. We can talk it over later.”

Beth nods after a moment, realizing that he means  _ without Allison,  _ and Kevin takes the opportunity to start asking about her job as some kind of consultant. Adam isn’t really paying attention. He stares at his plate after he finishes and stays silent. Looks like he and Sam don’t really know what else to say.

* * *

It’s about eight by the time Allison is successfully put to bed, and Sam and Kevin make another run for beer. That means Adam and Beth are sitting in the living room, getting to know each other. Like, swapping stories about being dumb kids, and also some light interrogation about how he’s related to sam, and what happened, and other deeply uncomfortable things like that.

“It seems like you had a pretty good life before you died,” she reflects, after he lays out his patchy story to the best of his ability. “Kate sounds like she was a good mother.”

“The best,” he agrees, with a fierceness that surprises him. “I was lucky to have her.”

“Sounds like it. And it also sounds like she did a good job with you.”

He gets that lump in his throat again, and then looks toward the front door as it’s shouldered open by the giant that is his half-brother. Half-brother. It’s almost natural to think of him like that now. Sam and Kevin seem more at ease with each other now, which makes him think that there wasn’t always bad blood between them. Kevin is the first back in the room, a bottle opener in one hand and a six-pack in the other. Sam follows with a bowl of potato chips, taking his seat next to Beth on the couch and looping his arm around her shoulders.

Kevin pulls the ottoman closer to the table and busies himself removing all the bottles from the cardboard packaging, then uncapping and distributing them.

“Adam was just telling me about his life in Windom,” Beth says, shooting him a knowing look. He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say, so he just nods. 

“That was our first stop. It’s a nice place. Homey.” Kevin is lying through his teeth, but Adam appreciates the compliment. Kind of.

“It’s in the boonies of Minnesota, Kevin, you don’t have to be polite about it.” He sips his beer, wondering if it’s clicked for any of them that he’s not twenty-one yet, or if they even care.

Sam crosses his left ankle over his right knee. It looks like an ordeal, with a frame that big. “We, uh. We’ve been there, too. Me and Dean.”

Right, because of the ghouls. “What did you think?”

“I mean, it was a small town. I don’t think I thought anything about it. It’s about the size of - how big is Thatcher? About five thousand?”

Beth squints thoughtfully. “Yeah, about. I’m sure they don’t look anything alike, though.”

“It’s also much less haunted.” Sam leans to the side to let Beth reach for the bowl of chips. “I mean, if there were murders, they were committed by people, and not, uh. Ghouls.”

“That’s an improvement,” Adam says, “but I was hoping for more of a five-star review.”

“It’s not haunted anymore, so I think that bumps it up to a three,” Kevin interjects.

For a moment, it’s like they’re having a normal after-dinner chill sesh, just some dudes being friends. 

Then Sam opens his big mouth. He can’t help it, really. Everything about him is just… big. “We actually met the ghoul who took your form after, um, eating you. Smashed his head in. So.”

That’s… unsettling. “Thanks. I guess.”

Sam seems to realize what he has just said. “No problem.”

Beth to the rescue, again. “Kevin, you said it was your first stop. I thought resurrections usually happen at the burial site? Unless there’s something I’m missing.”

Kevin scratches his head, then at the stubble on his chin. “No, you’re right. Adam told me he hitchhiked up to Minnesota from Ohio, actually.”

“We met in the ER,” Adam supplies helpfully, and watches as Sam almost spits out his drink.

“Why… were you in the ER? Both of you?”

“I was finishing up a hunt,” Kevin says. “Accompanying the victim’s family.”

Adam throws out, “I got hit by a minivan.”

“Kevin, you didn’t tell me any of this,” Sam says accusingly, but Kevin points at him with two fingers to shut him up.

“Yes, because you were already freaking out about Adam being  _ alive.  _ When the hell was I supposed to tell you that he got hit by a car?  _ Hey Sam, do you know an Adam Milligan? White guy, six feet tall, can take hits from soccer moms going full speed?” _

“Whoah, whoah, whoah,” Beth says, putting her hands up in a T-shape. “Time out. You got hit by a car? Are you okay?”

Adam shrugs. “I was fine. I mean, that’s the weird part. That’s what makes me believe all this bullshit - no offense - about angels and demons and shit. I didn’t even bruise.”

“So you don’t have a scar?”

“No scars whatsoever. Not even my old ones. Why?”

Sam rolls up his sleeve to show an old, faded splotch on his upper arm. If he squints, he can make out the shape of a hand. “Dean has one, too. From breaking out of Hell.”

“And I didn’t get the memo about us all getting matching tattoos.”

“It means it probably wasn’t an angel. Or at least, not an angel in its true form. Ours are both from Castiel.” 

Kevin folds his arms, tapping the bottom of the bottle against the arm of his chair. “So how  _ did  _ he get you out? Maybe that’s our first clue.”

Sam sucks in a breath, then lets it out slowly. “Castiel was having a… I guess you could call it a momentary God complex, and dragged my body out after about a month, but he botched the job, and my soul was down there for about a year longer, Earthside. Dean had to make a deal with Death to get my soul out. By that time, it was so fucked up from being in the Cage that Death had to set up a wall in my head to keep the memories out.”

Adam gnaws on his lip. They all know what’s coming next. “Did it work?”

“At first. But it eventually started cracking, and at one point, it just shattered. Cas took on the - I don’t know, the  _ substance  _ of the memories - in order to fix me. I was having seizures, hallucinating Lucifer, seeing things all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I almost died.”

“So why am I not a drooling nutcase right now? Do I have a wall?”

“That’s what I’m guessing, for now. We’ll have to wait for Cas to confirm it.”

Kevin coughs. Beth rests her beer on a side table and folds her arms, too, although she doesn’t move from Sam’s side. Adam can only assume they know which question he’s about to ask.

“There’s something else I don’t understand,” he says, rolling his beer between his hands. “How come no one ever tried to get  _ me  _ out? Like, Castiel jailbroke you both, but I wasn’t… on his list, or what?”

Sam sighs, and it’s deep and heavy this time.  “The Cage was built to hold Lucifer. It’s extremely hard to get into or out of it. It took the King of Hell, the highest-ranking angel in Heaven, and Death to get all of me out. After we used up our last favors, pretty much every greater power on Earth either wanted nothing to do with us or wanted to kill us. And if that sounds like a shitty excuse, it’s because it is. I know it is. I guess I figured that Michael would protect you.”

“It’s what he’s supposed to do, isn’t it?” That gets a surprising  _ amen  _ from Beth. “Look, I have no idea what kind of shit you went through. I don’t remember you, or anything you’ve done to or for me. I’m not here with a grudge or anything. I just want to know what the hell happened, and why it happened. And Kevin told me you could help with that.”

“Well, Dean and Cas will be here tomorrow noon at the latest,” Sam says. “I, uh, don’t suppose you remember Castiel at all?”

Adam shakes his head. “Other than the fact that you know him, and he’s somehow an angel, I have no idea who he is or what he looks like.”

Kevin flips the bottle opener between his fingers. “Speaking of Cas… do you think he’s even in a position to help right now?”

“It’s not like he’s losing knowledge as well as grace,” Beth says matter-of-factly. “And this is Dean’s half-brother. If I know Cas at all, he’s going to  _ make  _ himself helpful.”

“Did I ever meet Dean?”

Sam nods. “Yeah. Only for a short time. You got along pretty well, considering the circumstances. Like, the Apocalypse, and you being manipulated by angels and all. You’re a lot like him, actually.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment or not.”

“He’s a good guy. It’s a compliment.” He tries to sound encouraging. “He’s going to be relieved to see you. He’s also going to be, uh, worried. Probably. He spent a hell of a long time dealing with my sorry ass, pun intended, so that probably doesn’t bring back… reassuring memories. And you being in Hell at all, I mean… we’ve talked about it, you know? It’s - I mean, I know he wants to take all the blame for that.”

“Well, Jesus, I didn’t know I was such a morbid topic of interest,” he jokes lamely.

Beth snorts. “From what I gather, that’s what happens when you’re blood relations with a Winchester.”

“Lucky me.”

“So where does that leave your pal Kevin?” Kevin folds his arms. “I can’t keep towing you around. Something bad is bound to happen, with my luck. So that means he stays here indefinitely or leaves with Dean, or we find relatives of his that won’t freak out about him being alive.”

“I don’t actually know any of my relatives.” Adam shifts uncomfortably. “I mean, I’m sure we could track ’em down, but as far as I know, none of them said another word to my mother as soon as she told them she was pregnant and that the father had, y’know. Booked it.”

Sam winces. “I mean, you’re absolutely welcome to stay while we figure everything out. I don’t know if Dean’ll want to move us, though.”

_ While we figure everything out.  _ He gets the peculiar feeling that Sam, with all of his talk of brotherhood and responsibility, didn’t like him that much, whenever they last met. He hasn’t had much time to think about it, because most of it was spent being a space case on the road, but he has no idea what he’s going to do, once this - whatever it is - is over. He’s legally missing, and showing up looking exactly like he did in his picture is going to raise questions he’d rather not answer. It’d be hard to go back to college, basically impossible to get into med school.

“If he does, I’m throwing in my vote with him,” Kevin says. “Look, Sam, no offense, but he’s your brother. Half-brother. Whatever. Being  _ that  _ hasn’t really proved to be a good time for anyone. We still haven’t figured out how he got out of the Cage. There has to be someone looking for him, and sooner or later, they’re going to find him here. And I don’t know if it’s a good idea for him to be here when they finally catch up.”

“It’s either here or with Dean. I’m a hunter, Beth grew up around hunters. He’s safer with us than with almost anyone else, now that Bobby’s gone.”

“In case anyone wanted my opinion, I’d rather have him stay here. I don’t want to be responsible for turning a teenager into a hunter, and I’m sure Dean won’t want that, either.” Beth props her feet up on the coffee table with a note of finality. “I’d like him to stay here as long as he wants to.”

“Of course,” Sam says, startled. It probably didn’t even occur to him that he’d said  _ until. _

“I guess I don’t really have an option.” Michael shrugs. “As long as you’re okay with having a dead guy hanging around the house.”

Kevin gets a big smug smirk on his face. “Hey, Sam’s died a bunch of times. I’m sure he can show you the ropes.”

All three of them laugh. Michael feels left out of the joke.

* * *

_ It’s difficult to judge distances here. Maybe there’s no such thing as distance - they’re not in the physical world, after all. This is the Cage. The sun, or whatever that horrible light is, never rises or falls, just hovers above them like an angry open sore in a leprous sky. There’s usually a floor, which is red and wet, and heaps of flesh, covered in swarms of stinging things that look like locusts. Sometimes there isn’t a floor. Sometimes nothing is anywhere and he can see through the back of his own head. _

_ He’s always running. Running until he can’t run anymore, while Michael and Lucifer have their eyes on each other. Or on Sam. Running until he can find somewhere to hide and pray that Michael won’t find him this time. He stumbles into a grove of iron posts. They’re covered in cruel barbs, and he can see things hanging from them, miles and miles above. He squeezes himself between their smooth trunks, breath ragged, and curls up as best he can. If he’s small enough, maybe Michael won’t be able to see. _

_ In front of him lies a single eyeball, trailing a detached retina and a frayed optic nerve. He remembers studying eyes in his Introduction to Anatomy textbook. The pictures inside were all clean, with smooth strands of nervous fiber, and a snow-white sclera. If there’s anything he’s learned by now, it’s that nothing looks like it does in the textbook. He thought he’d have to wait until gross anatomy to see anything like this. There are still patches of bloody connective tissue all over it. As if someone had reached down into the socket and pulled it out. _

_ The iris is blue. The pupil is ringed with hazel. _

_ After a while, he realizes that everything is silent. That’s always a bad sign. It means the fighting has stopped. Or maybe his ears are gone. _

_ ADAM. _

_ He doesn’t need ears to hear Michael’s voice. _

_ ADAM. I CAN SEE YOU. DON’T HIDE FROM ME. _

_ No, he says, more out of despair than defiance. No. Stop. Just let me go. _

_ YOU’RE NOT SAFE, ADAM. I’LL KEEP YOU SAFE. _

_ No! _

_ Michael descends upon him like an avalanche of white light. _

_ He loses something like five years before Lucifer distracts Michael again. At least, that’s what Sam tells him. First he says something like, Who are you? To which he replies, I’m Adam, I’m your half-brother. And Sam, or the scraps of Sam that remain after Lucifer has finished playing with his food, sighs. You’ve been gone, he says. For years. _

_ It’s different every time. Sometimes when he wakes up, Sam (or Sam’s soul, its voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, but definitely not from his mouth) screams and curses him, asks him why he never helps. Screeches that he’s dying and Adam is helping them kill him. Sometimes he just babbles, incoherent apologies that repeat over and over again until they lose their meaning. He apologizes to Dean, to Cas, to Mom and John and Jess, to Jo and Ellen and Bobby, to Layla and Bela and Jake and Eva. To Adam. _

_ He runs, then. Far away. Never far enough to get away from the screaming and the sobbing, but far enough so that he doesn’t have to look at what they’ve done to Sam. _

_ But this time, it’s okay, and he hugs his knees, watching the world change around them. Rivers of pus flow backwards, angry red stars explode in the sky, and space warps around them until his head is inside out.  _

_ He sits there for a long time. Long enough that Sam eventually sits up next to him, whole again, and they lean on each other while the two other brothers try to kill each other in a place where nothing can ever die. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so get this: spilled water on laptop. laptop keyboard died. used external keyboard for a while. decided, since laptop was old and actively decaying, to get new laptop. new laptop arrives. transfer documents to new laptop. ms office promptly locks all my files. I retype this entire chapter on google docs. (so please excuse any formatting inconsistencies!)
> 
> next chapter: the shit begins to hit the fan. :D


	7. a cardshark and a gunman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> let's get this party started!

Michael – no, _Adam_ – wakes up in a cold sweat with a sense of foreboding lodged in his chest like a shard of ice. It takes a moment for him to realize he’s in the Winchesters’ guest room, having collapsed on the twin bed last night after complaining about a headache. The acrid smell of coffee tells him that everyone else is probably awake. When he tries the knob on the door, he realizes that his arms are shaking from exhaustion.

He shuffles out of the bedroom to the bathroom and washes his face. The hotel toothbrush he’s been using didn’t make it into the house, so he looks for a spare in the medicine cabinet and, surprise, there are actually a couple. He takes a nice green one along with a travel-sized tube of toothpaste and starts getting his act together.

By the time he gets to the kitchen, the only person there is Kevin. There’s a plate of pancakes and bacon on the table, which he assumes is for him. Kevin’s almost too mesmerized by whatever’s on his laptop screen to notice him, but when Adam starts eating, he looks up, and mumbles _good morning._

“Sam is running some errands and Beth went to work. I’m gonna head off after Dean gets here.”

“Okay.”

Kevin picks up his mug of coffee to find that it’s empty. He sighs and goes to the coffee machine, busying himself with scooping grounds and crimping paper filters into place.

The silence does kinda get to him. He slices into one of the pancakes. “Where’s the job?”

“Indiana. Then I might swing by Kentucky on my way to Texas.”

“Sounds… good?”

He snorts, punching in some settings and pressing the big silver BREW button. “Look, Adam, we’ll probably see each other again, knowing Winchester luck. Don’t worry about me.”

“It’s not that,” he protests. “It’s just that… you’re the only person I actually know, y’know?”

Kevin wipes his mouth with his hand. “You’ve known me for, what, a little more than a week? Give Sam time. He’s gonna take better care of you than I ever could. He’s good with people. I prefer not to be. You seem like a nice guy, so…” He interlaces his fingers. “I think you’ll get along.”

“Yeah.” He looks down at the remains of his pancakes. “It’s just weird, I guess. Like I had all this life before, but now it doesn’t count. And I’m starting over again for the second time in a month.”

“You’re related to the Winchesters. All that life was gonna come back to bite you in the ass someday.”

The comments from last night are still sitting strangely in his head. “What does that mean? You keep talking about Dean and Sam like they’re, I dunno, cursed.”

“I mean, kind of. Remember all that bloodline stuff? It’s ancient history. Trouble always finds those guys. But despite all of that, they’ve pretty much come out on top, so.”

“Good thing I don’t believe in curses, then.”

The coffee machine makes a gargling noise as it starts to brew in earnest. Adam puts his plate and silverware in the sink, folding up the sleeves of his Goodwill shirt before twisting the tap. It’s almost soothing, rubbing at spots of syrup with the sponge. He does the other plates, too, and the lone mug with blue flowers. Instead of loading up the dishwasher, he grabs a dishtowel from the counter and starts drying. He can feel Kevin watching him. _How much does that guy actually hang out with people?_ Probably not that often. This is the longest they’ve stayed in one place, really. Not that it means much.

He thinks that this is the farthest he’s been from home. He’s pretty sure about that. Mom being constantly on call didn’t leave much room for leaving Windom, much less Minnesota, except for holidays. Most of her family lives in Wisconsin and Iowa, but they never drove out to visit them or anything. She did her residency program in Windom and… pretty much stayed there, he guesses. After having him.

And now she’s dead. A lump grows in his throat. Everything he knows is gone.

Maybe not everything. He still doesn’t have his memories between his second resurrection and his descent into – _Hell,_ apparently, but he met Dean and Sam and Castiel at some point. That’s not nothing, even if it turns out they’re all a bunch of maladjusted assholes. But it’s not what he wants. He doesn’t want to start over with a bunch of hunters entangled in weird supernatural shit. He wants…

…well, he wants his mom.

He turns off the water and wipes his eyes, trying to sniff as inconspicuously as possible. Kevin’s a hardened badass vampire killer. He probably doesn’t cry, like, ever.

“Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah,” he croaks out unconvincingly.

“Leave the dishes, dude. Sit down.”

He does. Kevin sits down across from him, looking haggard and definitely not up for dealing with some teenager’s bullshit, which other people would maybe call _emotions,_ but those people are probably not hardened badasses who kill vampires.

“What’s up?”

Adam shrugs. “I – I miss my mom,” he says, half-laughing because it sounds so childish, but somehow getting closer and closer to actually crying.

“Yeah. I miss my mom too.” He shuts the lid of his laptop. “Talk about it?”

“I thought you guys weren’t into therapy.” He takes a napkin from the little holder at the end of the table and blows his nose before anything embarrassing can come out. “Sorry.”

“The way you talked about her, she seemed like a good person. She didn’t deserve to die like she did. And neither did you.”

Adam sighs. “She was a nurse. I wanted to go to med school because of her. And now she’s gone, and I…” He shrugs. “I’m probably not going back to college, huh?”

“Maybe community college? State school, even?” Kevin scratches his chin again. “I dunno. Depends on how everything pans out.”

“You were applying, right? When everything went down?”

“Yep. All the big ones. I thought I had it all figured out. Turns out some asshole dug up an angelic Rosetta Stone, and I got divinely autopiloted to it for some reason. Try telling your parents that you’re a prophet of God. Doesn’t go over as well as a full ride from Princeton.”

Adam laughs a little bit. The pressure behind his eyes is ebbing away, little by little.

Then it slams back into place with no warning. It’s less the pain than it is the shock that has him falling on his ass. He can hear the sounds of ceramic shattering and Kevin cursing loudly, but he can’t see any of it through the sudden aura blurring his vision. The pressure morphs inside his head, twisting, and then something switches off. A strange numbness washes over him, and his vision clears. He sits there in a daze as Kevin props him up against a cabinet, still swearing, and starts picking up the pieces of the plate he dropped.

He’s not sure whether he can move, or whether he just doesn’t _want_ to move, but something tells him not to fight it, to keep quiet.

A car door slams in the driveway, and there are voices muffled by the walls of the house. Kevin swears again, loudly, says something incomprehensible to him, and then he’s gone.

There is nothing, and more nothing, and then in the middle of all the nothing he finds a little more than nothing. It’s a spark in the infinite black. Its light is weak and fragile, but he feels familiar shapes in it – wheels spinning within wheels, crossing over, links and links within chains, a tiny eternity that could fit on the tip of his finger.

He doesn’t know why, but he’s terrified.

Bit by bit, the feeling recedes, like waves on the shore, and then they vanish entirely. Michael heaves in a huge breath and manages to get his legs under him, leaning on the counter as he splashes his face with water from the sink tap. He shakes his head to clear the last remnants of fog, and realizes he has no idea what the hell is going on.

Kevin, thankfully, is back.

“Are you okay?” he asks, hands out in front of him like Michael is about to fall over. Which… yeah. “It should be fine now, but I wanted to make sure before I let them in. Jesus, where’s Sam?” He digs his cell phone out of his pocket.

“I’m fine,” Michael says, and half-believes it. “I, uh. Felt pretty weird, but… I think I’m okay now. Do you know what happened?”

Kevin blows out a long breath while dialing Sam’s number. “I’m guessing it was Castiel’s angelic presence.”

“He’s making a great first impression, I gotta say.”

Kevin shoots him a look while his call picks up. “Hey, Sam? Just wondering, how long does it fucking take to pick up a rotisserie chicken? Yes. No. Nope. Bye.”

He doesn’t quite know why, but he stands all the way up and heads for the front door.

“What are you doing?” Kevin follows.

“Letting people inside,” he says, hand on the front door. “Unless you want us to have our first conversation in the driveway.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“No, but if my head’s going to explode, I’d rather get it over with now than wait around for it to happen.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

It is immediately apparent to Adam which of the men in the driveway is Dean. He doesn’t know how, or why, but he stops in his tracks and stares. Which is okay, because Dean stares, too.

If no one had told him beforehand, he wouldn’t have thought that the Winchester brothers were brothers. Where Sam is broad-shouldered and staid, unassuming even as his frame imposes, Dean is lean and calculating, sharp and wary. His eyes are definitely not the color of Sam’s eyes, although he can’t seem to recall Sam’s eye color at the moment; he has darker hair, a thinner nose, a sharper jaw. The only similarity between them, really, is the whole redneck-y flannel-jeans-jacket getup. Which, he admits, seems pretty practical.

And, standing behind him, Castiel – definitely not related, a round face with a cleft chin and an impassive expression, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, arms crossed.

He wants to say something, but what is there to say?

“Adam,” Dean says. The timbre of his voice is much different from Sam’s. Very… he fishes for the right word. _Raspy? Gravelly?_

“Dean,” he replies. Dean nods, wary.

“I’m Castiel,” Castiel says. His tone is flat and completely serious.

He almost laughs. “Yeah, I know. Are you gonna come in or are you comfortable out here standing around with your dicks in your hands?”

Dean shakes his head. “Jesus Christ.”

They all file into the living room – he guesses he should have expected Castiel to come along, too – and sit down awkwardly, Adam in the armchair and Dean and Castiel on the sofa. Castiel has great posture, but Dean kind of slouches and puts his elbows on his knees.

There’s a moment of silence before Dean clears his throat again.

“Uh, so,” he begins, “You remember me?”

“No.” How the hell is Sam less awkward than his brother?

Dean turns to share a glance with Castiel that he can’t see. When he looks back at Adam, he looks a little wary. “Okay. I’m Sam’s older brother, Dean, and I, uh, met you. A long time ago. Twice, actually. One time it wasn’t you.”

“It was a ghoul,” he supplies, testily.

Dean’s eyebrows go up. “How do you know that?”

Adam sighs. _Here we go again._ “I remember everything up until I died. The whole _eaten alive_ thing kinda sticks with you.”

“We killed ‘em. Just so you know.” He looks extremely uncomfortable.

“Sam told me. Thanks, I guess,” he says, because that seems like the appropriate thing to say, and they lapse into silence again.

It’s Castiel who breaks the silence this time. “So, you don’t remember anything about… Angels? Satan? Heaven and Hell?”

“I have nightmares about Hell, I think. Sam’s usually there, but not always. And… Saint Michael, apparently.”

There’s an extended awkward silence as Dean scratches his chin. The sound of it sets his nerves on edge. He’s not sure why until his irritation crystallizes into a big _fuck you._

“Look, can you just tell me what’s going on?” he snaps. “Everyone keeps beating around the bush about what happened to me. And what’s _going_ to happen to me.”

“You don’t remember anything about… about Michael?”

He shrugs, exasperated. “Only what Sam and Beth told me. You were supposed to be his vessel, right? Why’d they choose me, then?”

“If both of them got to come down here, they’d end up destroying the world. So I refused to let Michael use me. I didn’t know they were gonna get you as a backup, and I sure as hell thought we were going to be able to protect you from them.” There’s some bitterness that creeps in at the end, which Adam appreciates, because now he can start blaming people for the weird shit that’s been going on since he woke up incredibly naked in a random forest in Ohio, but at least he knows this guy feels kinda bad about it, maybe. “Did Sam tell you about his memories?”

“Not really. Just that it was bad, and Castiel had to take them.”

Castiel nods gravely. “The spiritual essence of them. I have been able to safely neutralize and contain his memories, but it was difficult, and he still remembers everything that happened. He simply doesn’t suffer the other effects.”

Dean sighs. “What they do to people down there… humans can’t handle it. Most of them find they’d rather accept deals from demons than spend eternity getting tortured. They become demons either way. But Sam came back, uh, human, more or less, so it seems like the Cage is different.”

“As far as we know,” the angel adds.

“Yeah. As far as we know.”

Adam leans back, folding his arms. “Okay, so… what were the other effects?”

“It was like that century in the Cage had – imprinted itself on his mind. So much so that it habitually recreated the conditions of the Cage for Sam once he got out.” Castiel shrugs. “He saw Lucifer constantly, talked to him. Saw pieces of Hell in real life. He was, quite literally, going insane.”

“So… PTSD?”

“We’re not sure.” Dean takes the reins back. “Maybe supernatural PTSD. Like Lucifer was still connected to him in some way before Cas cleaned up the memories.”

“And that’s going to happen to me?”

Castiel shrugs again. “You were in the Cage for thousands of years. Sam was only present for a century or so. There’s no reason to expect your situation to be the same as his, especially if Michael protected you. Lucifer had no interest in preserving Sam, but from what few memories I have of his time there, Michael had you under his wing more often than not.”

White light. “I remember some of that.”

He leans forward, suddenly expressing more interest. “Describe it.”

Dean opens his mouth and seems to not want Adam to describe it, probably in the interest of not triggering his younger half-brother into an episode of “supernatural PTSD” in his sister-in-law’s living room, but Adam ignores his muted protests, and reaches back into the dreams – memories.

“It was like going to sleep. I didn’t dream. I think he just kept me knocked out all the time, and I’d wake up if he got distracted… I’d – I’d try to find Sam, if I could. And then he was just gone, one day, and – I never… never went back to sleep.” He bites his lip. That’s the impression he gets from the dreams, but it still doesn’t feel quite right. Like he’s removed from it, when he knows he’d felt things so intensely that it almost burned him right up.

Castiel’s brow furrows. “He was protecting you from Lucifer, I assume.”

“I think so.”

“Have you found any strange or unusual markings on your body?” He changes the subject abruptly. “A handprint, perhaps?”

He shakes his head. “All of my scars are gone, actually. I’m smooth as a baby.”

“So you didn’t come out the way we did.” Dean turns to confer with Castiel. “What do you think, Cas? Who’d have an eye on him?”

“As far as I know, his only utility was as a secondary vessel. I cannot imagine anyone going to the trouble of extracting him from the Cage without Michael.”

“Okay, wait, I still have questions,” Adam interrupted. “How did I meet you guys?”

He could practically see Dean trying to doctor the story in his head and giving up. “We thought you contacted us from Windom, so we drove over to figure out – y’know, if you were a monster or not. And just as we got convinced that you weren’t, you and your mom tied up Sam and tried to eat him. We found your real corpses in a crypt out in the woods.”

“And you killed the ghouls, yadda yadda. Then what?”

Dean nods. “Uh, and then you got resurrected as a backup plan. For Michael. The angels sweet-talked you a bunch and we tried to convince you that they were a bunch of lying creeps, which only kind of worked. We’re not sure what happened, but you agreed to be the substitute. And, uh… here we are now.”

It’s frustrating to not be able to remember any of this because he _knows_ he would have had a different opinion about everything that went on, just as he has _opinions_ on what’s been happening so far. Like, what is he supposed to do?

Which comes out as, “So, what’s the plan?”

Dean scratches the back of his neck and shrugs. “Dunno. We won’t have one until we find out who’s after you.”

“I have been doing some research,” Castiel says.

“And?”

He seems to re-assess. “More like brainstorming. With some others. We have some theories as to why you returned, especially in the way that you did.”

“Well, okay, spill,” Adam says, spreading his arms in exasperation.

“There is,” Castiel continues as if he hadn’t snapped at him, “no consensus on how you might have been raised from Hell. There are certainly many parties interested in restoring Michael to his place in Heaven, but also many who are… against it. The only thing they can agree on is that he is still in the Cage, and hardly anyone bothered to notice your return. Jophiel suggested, not without reservation, that we might want to consult a demon.”

“Demons.” He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. If he’s willing to believe Castiel is an angel and can speak English, why not start believing in demons, too? But a giddy and not-insignificant part of his brain is still like: _Talking to demons? WTF?? Is this a high school slumber party? Whip out the ouija board, Patricia, we’re about to make a deal with the devil!_

“Yes. There are obvious risks associated with this consultation—”

“—possession, torture, getting dragged back into hell, being lied to, being lied to and then stabbed, getting stabbed and then dying—”

“—yes, Dean, I mentioned obvious risks—”

“Oh, you want me to provide _not-_ obvious risks? Okay, well, running into someone we pissed off, and _then_ getting lied to, stabbed, possessed, tortured, and killed, or maybe playing right into some asshole’s hands and getting possessed and being used to lie to, stab, torture, and kill innocent people, or—”

 _“Yes,_ Dean,” Castiel says testily. “I think we’re all much better acquainted with the gravity of our circumstances now. Anyway, we would have to summon one of the more highly-ranked demons—”

“—great idea—”

“—and arrange an exchange of information.”

“What information would we even give them?”

Castiel stares at Adam, and Dean slowly turns his head to look at him, too.

He stares back. “What?”

“It wouldn’t be hard to find someone who wanted Lucifer out again,” Castiel says.

Adam’s mouth falls open in disbelief for a good few seconds before he can find the words to respond. “I don’t remember shit! And even if I did, I don’t want to unleash fucking _Satan!”_

Dean throws his arms up. “Yes. Thank you. That’s what _I_ said.”

“It was merely a suggestion, but if you two are set on remaining ignorant until whoever it is out there that pulled Adam out of Hell comes back for him, then I suppose we will just have to deal with it when the time comes.”

“I’m just saying that maybe we don’t go out to find a demon with nothing but our dicks in our hands, okay?”

“I fail to see—”

“Forget it.”

Sam clears his throat. “Let’s, uh, table that for now. The number one priority is Adam’s safety. This house is pretty solid, don’t get me wrong, but it’s no…”

“Singer Salvage,” Dean completes, and something itches in the back of Adam’s mind. “Yeah. There’s always the bunker.”

“I think mobility will be our primary advantage for now. We may eventually need to move to the ‘Bat Cave’ if the threat is large enough, but immediately locking ourselves down in a known location is unwise.”

Kevin, who has remained conspicuously silent up until this point and has mainly been sipping aggressively from a mug of coffee, interjects. “And is this a known location?”

“Ah, no. The house is covered wall-to-wall in protective sigils. So is the car. And in this town, I’m not Sam. I’m—”

“Patrick,” Dean interrupts again, sitting up to illustrate Sam’s grand new life with a sweeping gesture. “Patrick Morris, king of Lancaster Auto Repair. All those times we popped a tire on the highway coming in real handy now, huh, Sammy?”

“Sure, Dean. Look, all I’m saying is that we don’t have all the time in the world to make a decision, but we have _some_ time. Unless trouble comes knocking, we have to pick a contact first, set up a meeting. We can take a couple days, reach out through the network.”

Adam puts his beer down and wipes his hand on his jeans, then shrugs and says, “And that’s it? We just wait?”

For some reason, the others turn to Castiel, who stares back at them for a moment before he realizes he’s being cued.

“Not exactly. Kevin told me you had a poor reaction to my presence earlier.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He grimaces. “I mean, I’m fine. It just felt weird.”

Kevin rolls his eyes. “You almost passed out.”

“Up until now, we’ve been working on the assumption that what happened to you is the same thing that happened to Sam when he left the Cage.” Castiel leans forward, elbows on his knees, hands laced. “But you’re already very different. I have to suppress my grace around you. There’s something about grace itself that makes you react… negatively. But that’s the source of my power, so we’ll have to figure out the nature of the reaction and what causes it.”

He’s just saying words, but for some reason, a chill runs down Adam’s spine. “Okay, so… are we going to run some allergy tests, or something?”

Castiel tilts his head. “I don’t know yet. At the very least, you’ll have to let me look into your soul and your mind to assess the situation.”

“Are you okay with that?” Sam adds gently. “It’s a lot. I know.”

Adam takes a deep breath. “Yeah. I mean, the alternative is sitting around twiddling my thumbs, and I – I want to know what the h— _fuck_ happened to me. When do we start?”

There’s a weirdly tense pause, and then Sam takes the wheel again. “Uh, we’ll get them settled in, and then… I guess it would be better to do it now, before Allison gets home? I mean, Beth might not want to see it either, because of the… you know.” The last comment is directed at Dean, who nods.

“Yeah. Cas, you good?” He jerks his head in the direction of the car. “Be back in a minute.”

“I’ll be fine, Dean.”

Dean puts his hands up and shoots a look at Sam, who starts cleaning up the table. Kevin finishes his beer and heads to the kitchen with Sam, leaving Adam alone with Cas. They both stand up in awkward silence.

Castiel isn’t what he thought an angel would look like. In church, they’re always wearing long white robes or medieval armor, and they’re always clean-shaven, with flowing blond hair. No wings, no harp, no nothing. He just looks like a regular guy in business casual. He guesses that’s usually the case, though – didn’t Pastor Young say that angels could appear human to avoid frightening people with their true forms? Come to think of it, shouldn’t Cas be some kind of physically impossible ox-headed winged dude, or something?

“I’ve come to realize that people prefer to have conversations like this in private,” he says, like a therapist, or maybe an alien. “Would you like to go into the guest room?”

“Uh, sure.” Adam throws a look back over his shoulder to the kitchen. Sam and Kevin are talking shop. Suddenly, he feels very alone.

* * *

When they enter the room, Cas presses his hand to the wall, and a web of symbols lights up from behind the wallpaper. It looks like some seriously occult shit. Adam’s skin crawls as he examines the fading pentagrams and sigils.

“Nothing to be concerned about,” Cas says, as if he can sense Adam’s discomfort. Well, he’s an angel, so he probably can. _Do not be afraid,_ and stuff. “It’s all protective. And none of it is connected to an entity.”

“No offense, but it looks like you’re going to ask me to cut my hand and participate in a blood ritual any second now.”

“We don’t need a blood ritual for this.”

“Oh. My mistake.” How is that an actual consideration?

“I’ll add a few special protections, just in case.”

Adam sits on the bed as Cas takes a marker out of his pocket and begins to sketch out a sigil in quick, precise strokes on top of the wallpaper. He can’t imagine Sam will be happy about that. “Protections from what?”

“Detection. I don’t know what’s going to happen, so it’s best to be prepared for as many outcomes as possible.”

“Are you expecting something to go wrong?”

“I don’t know, Adam.” He draws two more sigils and then touches the wall again, making the protective network glow, this time with three new additions. “That should be enough.” Satisfied, he pulls up the chair from the desk and sits down across from him. “If you have any questions, you should ask them now.”

Of course, he blurts out, “Are you possessing someone right now?”

Castiel blinks. “Yes. My vessel’s name is James Novak. His soul is in Heaven, so he no longer has use for this body.”

“So he died before you – did that?”

“No. I had to get his consent before entering him.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” he says lamely. “Wouldn’t want to enter someone without their consent. That’s what we learned in health class.”

Cas looks at him in confusion, but the kind of confusion that’s like, _I genuinely thought you were smarter than this._ “That’s one of the things we’ll have to discuss. Dean said that the last time he saw you before you were possessed, you were running from Michael and not in the mindset of a consenting vessel.”

“I don’t remember that. Any of it.” He shrugs. “Kevin said you were ‘power-hungry bastards,’ but – I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the good guys? All I knew about angels back then was what they taught in church. Messengers of God, helpers of mankind, all that stuff.”

“That might have been the case for some of us thousands of years ago, but many of my brethren tired of servitude long before that. Lucifer being one of them.”

“Right. The Devil.” There’s a long pause before he says, “Can you – what was Michael like? I mean, I don’t really… I thought they were nightmares, but I guess…”

Cas looks _sad._ “He was the best of us. Completely loyal to his Father, and a great lover of humanity. What you learned in church wasn’t _complete_ nonsense. He fought to protect you for a very, very long time, since you were just a clump of cells swimming in a tidal pool. But he wanted to be a good son, even if it meant ending your world and killing you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not saying this to make you sympathize with him. I know what he did to Sam. But we were brothers for billions of years, and I’d like to help you understand, if I can.”

Adam thinks of Kevin and Sam, even though they’re not brothers – the quiet rage he simmered in, all the way from the motel to Sam’s driveway, still trusting him to have answers, to be willing to help. Thinks of his mom, her sister, the only family they still talked to after he was born, the tight smiles at Christmas and Thanksgiving, the visits to the hospital until there was no more reason to go.

“I think I get it,” he says.

The angel nods shortly.

“But, uh, one more question. Does this mean God is real?”

“Yes. He is real, and negligent.”

“Oh. Well, I always thought he must be a pretty big asshole.” He tries for a smirk, but the freakout is getting real and he has to stop his leg from jittering. “You, uh, got questions for me?”

“Yes.” It feels like the room has gotten quieter since they sat down to have this little consultation. It’s like the ambient anxiety is muffling even the sounds of his heart pounding in his ears. Castiel looks at him, assessing, then says, “What happened in your dreams?”

For some reason, that question freezes him. Not even the muscles in his throat can move. Every muscle in his body has locked up at the mere thought of _running across the meat of the ground. The light that swallowed everything, even his shadow, forever and ever, until they became nothing together._

“Adam?”

He shakes his head, and Castiel snaps back into focus. _Adam?_ Right, Adam. “I… sorry. Sometimes it’s like – I don’t know.”

“Kevin told me you said your name was Michael when you met.”

“Yeah. That was before I remembered, uh. Before I died, the first time.” There’s a fizzing feeling in his stomach, like he’s going to puke. “All I remember is – you guys called in the Cage, right? It makes sense, in the dream, but when I wake up, I don’t know how to describe it. It feels impossible.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. It wasn’t built for humans. You would have trouble comprehending it without the interference of an archangel.”

“I don’t know what that means.” He crosses his arms, trying to hide the tremors in his hands. _Deep breaths. This is not the time._ “Uh, but I’m always running, I think. Away from someone. And that’s Michael, I guess.”

“Because you’re afraid?”

“I think so. Or maybe – I guess I’m trying to find Sam, sometimes. But there’s a lot of moments where it’s just nothing. Like, _nothing._ How can I remember it if it’s nothing?”

Nothing changes about Castiel’s expression, and that’s a relief, actually, because it’s better than pity or confusion. It feels like he might actually know something, and even the idea of that helps keep him calm.

“I won’t know until I see it for myself. But it’s probably a screen of some kind, to prevent you from accessing more… damaging memories. Do you ever remember seeing Michael?”

“No. Not up close. I just heard him talking to me, sometimes. Telling me to come back, that it wasn’t safe.”

“Do you want to do this today? It seems like you’re…” Castiel gestures to his face.

“Yeah. No, I’m fine, I just—” He wipes his cheek with the back of his hand. It comes away wet. Holy shit. “Jesus. I’m fine. I swear I’m fine.”

“We can postpone this until you’ve spoken more with Sam and Dean at length,” he says guardedly. “If you’re frightened—”

“It does scare me. It scares the shit out of me. But not more than I can handle. Okay? So just do it. Whatever you’re going to do.”

Castiel takes his hand, and it’s so familiar he thinks he’s going insane – not his hand being held, but the invisible glow, the _feel_ of something moving through him. It feels like a punch in the face, and he barely manages to catch himself on his elbow before he falls back onto the bed. It’s not the same. He can’t feel the shapes, the celestial clockwork. His head is burning with invisible fire, but there’s no pain. He forces himself to sit back up, to breathe until it becomes tolerable again. It ebbs away, slowly, until he can actually think again.

“Goddamn,” he gasps.

“That’s essentially what happened,” Castiel remarks dryly. “This seems to work. I can look now.”

“Okay. I – yeah, okay.”

He nods solemnly and drops Adam’s hand, then slowly takes his head in his hands, fingers splayed out over the crown, thumbs crossing his temples.

“Are you ready?” His palms are warm.

Adam swallows nervously, head still spinning, and nods. He stares at the grain of James Novak’s stubble, the cleft of his chin, trying to get his bearings. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

“Close your eyes. Try not to think of anything in particular. I’ll be quick.”

“Okay.”

He does as Cas says, and forces his eyelids down, trying not to think too hard about anything.

At first, it’s just him, but then, in an instant, his world floods with white light.

_No, no, no no no no no—_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [emerges from my lockdown fugue state] so I heard some more news and saw some screenshots and I gotta say: LMAO. welcome back I'm not dead yet and I am fueled by pure spite


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